“And you should stop being so moody.”
She said nothing. Her mother could not possibly understand. She was an ice maiden when it came to these things; she had no idea, none at all, about how it felt when the only boy you could ever love was seeing some Canadian girl and telling Ted about it. They were standing at the supermarket check-out now, and the woman behind the till was looking expectantly at her mother, waiting for her to unload the cart. The woman had a dull, passive look to her, and behind her, ready to pack the purchases, stood a boy with a scowl. Clover looked through the plate-glass window behind them, out into the supermarket car park; a large white vehicle, a luxury SUV, was pulling up at the kerb. She watched as a young couple got out, and said something to one another, laughed briefly, and then went back to looking bored. That’s the trouble, she thought: everybody here is bored. She did not want that. She wanted something different, and that, she knew, was James. I want him more than anything I’ve ever wanted. I want to be with him. I want to feel him beside me. I want to be far away from everybody else, just with him. I want him to whisper to me and kiss me and tell me all his secrets and that he thinks of me all the time. That’s what I want, and that’s what’s going to happen – it really is. It will happen if I want it hard enough.
19
“There,” said Billy, pointing to a spot where the land jutted out into the sea. “That’s the place. You can put everything down there and then we can swim.”
Amanda had suggested a picnic, and they had agreed – Billy more enthusiastically than his sister. She had said initially that she wanted to stay at home, having things to do. Amanda had said, “To mope?”
“No. Things to do.”
“Then do them after our picnic – there’ll be plenty of time.”
It was a place they had often visited – a place where the mangrove met a cluster of sea-grape trees and where there was enough sand to make for a small swimming beach. The beach gave way to rock formations on either side through which the sea was making slow ingress, wearing away at the basalt to produce strange indentations and incipient caves. When an onshore wind whipped up waves, the movement of the sea, though dissipated here by the protective ring of reef a mile or so further out, was sufficient to produce the occasional plume of spray from a blowhole, shooting up like a displaced ornamental fountain. As a young girl, Clover had been fascinated by this, and had been prepared to sit for hours on end, under Margaret’s watching eye, waiting for the sudden eruption of white.
“Don’t dive,” warned Amanda, as Billy rushed to the edge of the water. “Remember what happened to that boy …”
Billy stopped in his tracks. “Timmy …”
“Yes, Timmy. He was lucky not to have been much more badly hurt.”
Billy stared at the water. “He was knocked out, wasn’t he?”
“Concussed – not quite knocked out. But it could have been much worse.”
Clover joined in: “You shouldn’t dive into water if you don’t know exactly how deep it is.”
“Your sister’s right,” said Amanda. “Listen to her.”
“He never does,” said Clover.
While the boy waded into the water, Clover and her mother unpacked the bag of picnic provisions they had brought with them. There was a flask of iced juice, and Amanda poured some for her daughter. Clover took it, drained the glass, and then lay back on the picnic rug and looked up at the sky.
“Happy to be here?” asked Amanda.
“Yes.”
Amanda lay back too. “I love looking at this sky. You can’t lie back in Scotland and stare at the sky.”
“It would rain on you.”
“Yes.”
Flat out on the sand, Amanda turned her head to look at her daughter. She was an attractive girl – still obviously a teenager, but getting to the point where the adult butterfly finally emerged, where all vestiges of the vulnerability and softness of the child gave way to the grown young woman. “Happy?” she asked.
“I’ve already told you. Yes.”
Amanda persisted. “Not just to be here, but happy in … in general. With life?”
“Yes. Of course.”
“I wanted to talk to you.”
Clover was still staring at the sky. “Well, we’re talking, aren’t we?”
“About me and Daddy.”
This was greeted with silence. Above them, a high-flying jet curved a line of white across the sky.
“You see,” said Amanda, “I have some rather good news for you. Or I think you’ll find it good news.”
There was little reaction.
“You’re listening to me, I hope. You aren’t going to sleep, are you?”
This brought a muttered response. “No, I’m not.”
“Daddy and I are going to live together again. We’ve talked it through. We’re getting on better and we … well, both of us have been lonely. You understand that, don’t you?”
She saw her daughter stiffen. She continued to lie still, but the effect had been immediate.
“Yes, I understand. I’m a bit surprised, though.”
“It’s a surprise for me, too. So I’ll go back to Scotland, but only to close up the flat. Then I’ll come back home. Billy will go back to the Prep.” She was aware of the fact that she said home. There had been a change, as slow, in human terms, as the erosive action of the sea on the rock: home was no longer New York, or America; it had become this place in the middle of nowhere, under a familiar, but still alien flag.
“So everything will go back to how it used to be.” She paused, and reached to the flask to pour more juice. “I hope you’re pleased.”
Clover had raised herself onto an elbow and was looking at her mother. She was smiling. “I’m really pleased, Mum. I’m really pleased.”
“Good. Then give me a kiss.”
Clover leaned forward and kissed her mother on the cheek. She wanted to cry, and the tears now came, sobs, almost painful in their intensity.
“Darling, you mustn’t cry …”
She struggled with the words. “It’s because … because I’m so pleased.”
“I’m glad.”
Clover wiped at her eyes. “And Billy? Does he know?”
“I’ll tell him later – after his swim. Both of us – we can both tell him. Not that he’ll pay much attention.”
Clover shook her head in disagreement. “He misses Dad. Surely you’ve noticed that.”
It was a reproach, and Amanda tried to explain herself. “Yes, you’re right. I suppose I was just thinking how boys don’t feel so intensely about these things.”
This caught Clover’s attention. “They don’t?”
“Well, it’s a bit of a generalisation, of course, but these generalisations are often true. Or at least, I think they are. Boys – men too – are more interested in the outside world than the inside world.”
“The inside world?”
“How we feel. Of course there are plenty of men who feel these things, but generally speaking they’re too busy doing things to ask themselves how they feel about them. That’s why it sometimes seems to us that they don’t care about people’s emotions.”
“Because they’re selfish?”
“Not selfish – it’s more a question of indifference.”
“What exactly is indifference?”
Amanda glanced across the beach to where Billy was examining something washed up by the waves – a cuttlefish, she thought. “Indifference is not worrying about others. And that may be because you don’t know what they’re thinking, or because you know and don’t care.”
“Indifference,” muttered Clover, as if savouring the new word, like a new taste, experienced for the first time.
Amanda glanced at her. We let our children grow up under our noses without talking to them about these things; now she was. “Which is one of the worst things you can experience.”
Clover frowned. “Why?”
“Because when we want somebody to notice us and the
y don’t, there’s a particular sort of pain involved.” She paused. Billy had picked up something else – an abandoned sandal – and was waving his discovery at them. “Put it down, Billy.”
“He picks everything up,” said Clover. “The other day I saw him pick up a handkerchief somebody had dropped. Think of the germs.”
“We need a certain number of germs – just to keep our immune systems in trim.”
Clover was not convinced. “Yuck.” She was looking up at the sky again; but it was indifference that was on her mind. “You were saying …”
Amanda hesitated. She knew what her daughter was going through, and this discussion of indifference went to the heart of it. “We all want to be loved, you know. We want that rather badly.”
Clover said nothing.
“And so,” Amanda continued, “that’s why indifference can be so painful. We may decide that we want to be loved by a particular person – and we can’t really control who that will be – and if they don’t love us, if they take no notice of us, we hurt. It’s the way we’re made, I suppose. It just is.”
Clover propped herself up on an arm and stared at her mother. “Why are you saying all this?”
Amanda took a deep breath. “I’m saying it, darling, because I think that’s what you may be feeling. I think you’re very keen on a boy whom you haven’t seen for the last three years and who is probably rather different from when you saw him last.”
“He isn’t,” muttered Clover.
“Have you seen him? You haven’t, have you?”
“I saw Ted. He told me.”
Amanda smiled. “Maybe. Maybe. But the point is that you don’t really know whether you’re going to be able to resume the friendship you had. And you don’t really know how James feels, do you?” She reached out and took Clover’s hand. She felt the sand upon it; the fine white grains that would cling to your skin, like face-powder, long after you had left the beach. “I think you may be in love with an idea of a boy, rather than with an actual boy.”
She did not take her hand away, allowing it to remain in her mother’s clasp. “I don’t think I am.”
“But you don’t know yet whether James sees you in the same way that you see him. That’s the problem. And it might not be a good idea to allow yourself to love somebody you don’t see very much and who may not feel the way you feel. It’s just likely to make you miserable, I’d have thought.”
Amanda pressed Clover’s hand. She had never spoken to her with this degree of intimacy, and it felt to her as if she had been admitted to a whole new dimension of her daughter’s life. It was like coming across one’s child in some private moment and seeing the child, perhaps for the first time, as a person who was quite distinct from you, with a moral life of his or her own. Perhaps that was a transition that every parent experienced as a son or daughter moved from being an extension of the parent to having a life led separately from the parent, with its own tides of feeling, its own plans.
“Darling,” she said, “there’s an expression that people bandy about: love hurts. It sounds like one of those things that people say without thinking because they’ve read about it somewhere, or heard it in a song. But those things are often true, even if they sound corny and over-used. Love really does hurt. It hurts when you realise how much you love somebody. It hurts whether or not that person loves you back and everything goes well, or whether they don’t and they ignore you or treat you badly. It just hurts, because that’s the way love works. Does any of this make any sense to you?”
There was a murmur – nothing more.
“So as you go through life, you work out a way of dealing with it – just as you work out a way of dealing with the other things that happen to you. You could deny your feelings and try never to fall in love – lots of people do that – but that’s no way to live. So you work out how to control the impact of love. You learn to protect yourself from being too badly bruised by it. You let yourself go, but always remembering that you have to keep part of you from being … well, I suppose, from being too badly hurt – from being drowned.”
Clover looked away. “I like James. That’s all.”
“That’s all?”
“Yes.”
Amanda looked at her watch. “We need to begin our picnic. Perhaps you could go and fetch your brother from the water.”
“He’ll come if you shout food,” said Clover. “Like a dog.” She paused. “Do you think boys are a bit like dogs?”
Amanda laughed. “In some respects,” she said.
20
They welcomed Amanda at the tennis club as if her absence had been three months rather than three years. Although there was a floating population of expatriates – those who came for a few years before going on somewhere else, or returning to the place they had come from – there were others who stayed for years, for the greater part of a lifetime in some cases. These people might spend much of their time elsewhere but seemed drawn back to the sheltering skirts of the place that having asked so little from them in terms of tax, then made no demands of them other than that they pay their bills and refrain from challenging corrupt politicians or well-connected developers. If they had the bad taste to be rich, then they might at least have the good taste to keep a low profile politically, and certainly not give others their advice.
With money, there came an ability to escape the normal constraints of geography. Most people did not have much choice about where they lived, and they stayed there year upon year. By contrast, the wealthy could move about as they wished, following the tides of whim and fashion. But too much absence could be a bad thing: being off island meant that you were away, but would probably return when you had had enough of the grind of existence in London or New York or wherever it was that you had gone to.
So the secretary of the tennis club merely added Amanda’s name to the club competition ladder and sent her the bill for a renewed membership even without asking her whether she still wanted to play tennis.
“I heard you were back,” she said when Amanda first visited the club. “I took the liberty of adding you to the doubles ladder: we needed another woman for the mixed doubles and I thought of you.”
Amanda had not objected. “My tennis is rusty,” she said. “I joined a club in Edinburgh but you know how it is in Scotland. They have all-weather courts but that doesn’t really help all that much if there’s wind.”
“You can book the pro.”
“I will.”
Clover went with her mother for her first lesson, and watched as Amanda returned serve after serve and responded to shouted instructions.
“He shouldn’t shout at you like that,” she muttered at the end of the lesson. “You’re paying him, aren’t you?”
“That’s the whole point, darling. This island is full of people …” – she almost said rich people, but stopped herself – “who pay others to shout at them. Personal trainers, and so on. There are hundreds of them.”
Clover did not come to watch the second lesson, which took place the next afternoon, in that crucial hour before evening fell when the temperature was right for activities that involved exertion. The coach was impressed with the progress they had made and shouted less; her backhand, he said, was improving and would obviously get stronger with practice. At the end of the lesson, she made arrangements for the next session and then went into the club house for a shower. She did not intend to stay, as David would be back for dinner in an hour or so and she had nothing prepared, but she stopped by the noticeboard to look at the latest postings. The ladder was there – she saw her name in the mixed doubles section – and there was a poster advertising an exhibition match between the top-ranked player in Florida and a finalist from the Australian Open. It was to be on Boxing Day and there would be a dinner afterwards in aid of club funds. There was an appeal for a lost racquet – “of purely sentimental value” – removed accidentally, of course, from a car. No questions would be asked if the racquet were to be returned.
There
was a voice behind her – so close that it startled her.
“See – there is a crime wave, whatever the Commissioner of Police may say.”
She turned round to see George Collins. He was dressed for work, in a smart white shirt with buttoned-down collar and a red tie with a worked-in motif – a rod of Asclepius, the snake twirled round the physician’s staff. In the confusion of the moment, her eye was drawn to the tie; he noticed, and smiled.
“People sometimes misunderstand this,” he said. “One of my patients even asked if I was a snake-handler. I think she was disappointed when I explained that it all just had to do with an old Greek god.”
She looked up at him, and she felt a sudden emptiness in her stomach. She had imagined that she would meet him on this trip; the island was too small for people to avoid one another. That could be done, of course, at the cost of some effort; two warring grandes dames who had left Palm Beach precisely to avoid contact with each other and had, by coincidence, both chosen Grand Cayman as their refuge, had been obliged to work out an unspoken rota that allowed them to frequent the same parties, but at different times; one came early and left early; the other arrived once the coast was clear.
She had thought it would be at a party, when she would have time to prepare herself. She had rehearsed in her mind how she would behave; how she would appear unfazed by the meeting; how she would indicate by a casual, friendly demeanour that she bore no resentment or disappointment; that whatever had happened was a long time ago – three years was sufficient for people to get over most things, she felt, except, perhaps, sexual involvement: that was more difficult – the memory of intimacy was always there in the background, no matter how casually treated; the other had been admitted to the personal realm as others, acquaintances, friends, colleagues, had not.
But none of the scripts she had prepared came to her in this setting, before the tennis club noticeboard, where the opening remark had been about crime and a missing tennis racquet.
Banality came to her rescue. “Sometimes I wish somebody would steal my racquet,” she said. “My game might improve with a new one.”