She turns off the main road at the roundabout, and the ghosts of school hide their faces. Here, entering the village of Edenfield down the Newhaven road, she meets other memories, inherited memories, passed on by her grandmother, the one who now lives in France. This is the village where her grandmother grew up, in the very house to which she’s now driving. Just one of the many cords in the net of time and place that hold Alice so tight: Jack’s family home was once her grandmother Pamela’s home.
Newly returned from Massachusetts, lovelorn and jet-lagged, Alice is in a fragile condition. Today is Saturday. On Monday morning she’ll be back at her desk in Mortimer Street making up for the last two weeks. For two days only she can be her mother’s little girl again, and put off the reckoning with adult life.
She turns right at the village shop, down the narrow lane past the line of council houses, past the field where they hold the village fete, and onto the unpaved track that leads to River Farm. She parks in the yard by the barn. From inside the barn come banging noises and the occasional grunt.
Jack is not home. He’s gone into Lewes on some errand, promising to be back in time for Alice, but he’s not back.
Laura, his mother, says, “It gives us a chance to gossip about Nick Crocker.”
Laura is still beautiful, now in her fifties. She leans against the Aga in the kitchen, waiting for a kettle to boil to make them tea, strands of loose blond hair falling across her face.
“Is he still breaking hearts?” she says.
“All the time,” says Alice.
“Even though he’s got a wife.”
“They’re getting a divorce.”
“Poor old Nick. So what’s he doing these days?”
Alice is on the point of saying, He’s been thinking of killing himself. But Nick so wanted Laura to think well of him. It’s a small-enough parting gift.
So she says, “He’s taken himself off to live in a cabin in the woods.”
“A cabin in the woods.” Laura busies herself making tea. “Not so romantic when you’re over fifty.”
Henry, Jack’s father, appears looking red in the face.
“In case anyone calls,” he says, “I’m in the barn chopping logs for kindling. Oh, hello, Alice.”
“All right, darling,” says Laura.
“But no one will call.”
He goes again.
“I don’t know whether to be sorry for him or to say it serves him right,” says Laura. “Nick, I mean. Not Henry.”
“He says he’s trying to cut the self loose.”
“Oh, really. He doesn’t sound as if he’s changed at all. You know, for years I thought he was a bastard, but secretly I rather admired him for dumping me. Then he showed up here, and I realized he wasn’t a bastard at all. Just . . . well, lost.”
“I think he has changed,” says Alice. “Maybe he has. Actually, I wouldn’t know.”
She becomes confused and realizes she’s blushing. Laura gives her a quick look.
“Don’t tell me he had a go at you.”
Alice says nothing, which is admission enough.
“You have to give him his due,” says Laura. “He doesn’t give up.”
“I’m embarrassed,” says Alice.
“Don’t be,” says Laura. “I’ve been there.”
She pours them both a cup of tea, and shakes out a packet of caramel chocolate digestives onto a plate, and they sit down at the kitchen table like a couple of teenagers.
“He used to be impossibly attractive,” says Laura.
“He still is,” says Alice.
“Has he looked after himself? I mean, he hasn’t got all flabby, has he?”
“No,” says Alice. “Not at all.”
“He had such a beautiful body. Oh God, I’m talking over thirty years ago now.”
“He’s still in good shape.”
“And can he—” She breaks off, laughing. “Listen to me!”
“He has strings of girlfriends,” says Alice. “All younger than me.”
“Oh, honestly! When’s he going to grow up?”
“You know,” says Alice, “when I first met him I thought all of that, but I still wanted him to want me. What’s wrong with me?”
“We’re all the same,” says Laura. “Henry says it comes down to status. We want the men that other women want.”
“But it’s not just that. Please don’t tell anyone I said this”—she means don’t tell Jack—“but for a day or two I was really crazy about him. Real full-on passion.”
“Me too,” says Laura. “For a lot longer.”
“Does Henry mind about Nick?”
“Oh, Henry knows Nick’s no threat. Even though I was never passionate about Henry the way I was about Nick. I was fond of Henry, and I felt safe with him. I knew he was in love with me, or thought he was. So there wasn’t really any need for me to be in love with him. But guess what? With every year that’s gone by, I’ve loved him more.”
Alice thinks of the red-faced balding man chopping wood in the barn, and feels touched.
“But don’t you miss the passion?” she says.
“Passion’s all about anxiety, isn’t it?” says Laura. “With Nick, I was never sure of him. He never told me he loved me. I never felt worthy of him. I expected him to leave me every day. And one day he did.”
“But it works with Henry?”
“Yes. It works.” She waves a hand round the kitchen. “We’ve made a world together. Raised children. Got history. That’s strong stuff, Alice.”
They hear a car pulling up in the yard outside.
“That’ll be Jack now.”
“You won’t tell him, will you?” says Alice.
“Wouldn’t dream of it.”
Jack comes in looking cross.
“Sorry, sorry, sorry. I’ve been in a bloody secondhand bookshop, where no one has a clue where anything is, trying to find a stupid book for a friend.”
“Why don’t you just go online?” says Alice.
“I would, but I don’t know the title or the author. I’d know it if I saw it. It has a picture on the front of a boy on a wooden horse blowing a trumpet. The title has Christmas in it.”
“Christmas with the Savages,” says Alice.
Jack stares at her.
“That’s exactly it. How extraordinary.”
“My mum used to read it to me.”
“I’m going to call Jenny right away. Get her off my back.”
He pulls out a phone, and moves away into the hall. Alice can hear him leaving a voice message.
“Jenny, I found it. Not the book, the title. It’s Christmas with the Savages. It’ll be easy to get online. See you Monday.”
Alice sees Laura looking at her, and gives a shrug of her shoulders.
“Funny the things you remember.”
She doesn’t want Laura to see she’s put out by Jack’s preoccupation.
“I’d better get back to my emails,” says Laura.
She goes as Jack reappears.
“That’s that out of the way,” he says.
Then he just stands there, looking at her. Alice has a sudden sensation that everything between them has changed. It makes no sense: their history remains the same. Then it hits her. She’s the one who has changed. Nick has changed her.
“So,” she says.
“So.”
He knows too much and too little. Where do you start?
“Mum’s given you tea and biscuits, I see.”
He helps himself to a chocolate caramel digestive. Stands there in front of her eating it, dimly aware as he does so that it’s bad manners, but wanting it too much. The biscuit crumbles in his hand.
“Do you have to be such a pig, Jack?”
“No,” he says. But he goes on eating.
“So who’s this Jenny?”
“One of the teachers. We got into this thing about books we loved as children.”
“Does she have lots of curly brown hair?”
“Yes.??
? He looks startled. “How do you know?”
“Facebook.”
“Oh. Right.”
“So is she a serious prospect?”
“A serious prospect? No, not at all.”
“I don’t see why not,” says Alice. “She looked pretty.”
“Yes, well.” Jack’s face manages to finish his biscuit and express ambivalence at the same time. “Look, how about this walk?” This is the plan they’ve made, to meet up for a walk on the Downs. “Caburn or Edenfield?”
“You choose.”
He chooses what he calls the home walk, up Edenfield Hill. As soon as they’re on their way, the awkwardness between them drops away. They pass the big house and turn up the farm track. Climbing the hillside, walking abreast, they’re able to talk at last.
“You really helped me, you know, Jack. What you said about endings.”
“I can’t remember what I said.”
“You said to use the ending I’ve got. I started out thinking I was writing about Mabel and Austin. Now I think it’s really about Mabel and Emily.”
“What about the love affair? What about sex in the dining room?”
“The love affair still happens. Only now I’m making Emily be the driving force. Austin was very timid and conventional. I like the idea that it was Emily who pushed him into the affair. Passion by proxy, sort of thing.”
“Listening at the dining room door.”
“Plus—and this is my latest idea—Emily wants to hook Mabel. She’s spotted Mabel is the one she needs to champion her poems to the world. Which of course Mabel does.”
Jack’s impressed.
“That’s clever.”
“At the end I thought I could have Emily visit Mabel, just before Mabel dies. As a kind of ghost. She goes to her to thank her.”
“So all along Emily was seducing Mabel.”
“I have this sense that Emily had a will of iron. I think she was pretty ruthless in the way she made all the people round her serve her genius. Mabel was like her surrogate. She could have sex through Mabel. And Mabel could live on after her, and run her bid for immortality.”
“Which paid off.”
“That’s my ending.”
“Well,” said Jack, “so much for love. Trumped by poetry.”
“There’ll be heaps of love. Heaps of sex. But that’ll all be a subplot.”
They pass the swing trees, with the low curving branches. From here on the track becomes steeper.
“So how about the other love story?” says Jack.
Alice doesn’t pretend not to understand.
“That one doesn’t have an ending. It just stops.”
“Did you go to the cabin in the woods?”
“Yes, I went.” She means to leave it at that, but he does that teacher trick of his, leaving a space for her to tumble into. “I don’t know what to say, Jack. I think he’s one of those people who only really knows how to be alone. I met his wife. His ex-wife. She says he’s like Emily Dickinson, only without the genius. She could be right.”
“So he didn’t ask you to share his cabin?”
“He didn’t even want me in the door.”
“I’m sorry.”
The way he says it sounds like he means it. He can tell she’s been hurt, and he feels sympathy, which is decent of him.
“Thanks, Jack. All my own stupid fault. God knows what I thought I was doing.”
“Having an adventure.”
“Yes. Something like that. You know, I had a really good talk with your mum before you got back. She was great. She said passion comes from anxiety.”
“We all want it, though, don’t we?”
They’re climbing up onto the brow of the hill, by the concrete triangulation point. A stiff breeze hits them, coming off the distant sea. They follow the top path that leads to Firle Beacon. To the south lies Newhaven, with its jetty reaching out towards France. To the north the green and grey plains of their world.
“You can see our house,” says Jack.
He points it out, in the angle between the main road and the river.
“Our house is somewhere out there too,” says Alice.
It’s masked by the mass of Mount Caburn, but it’s not so far away. You could walk from there to Jack’s house if you were feeling energetic.
Jack points to the strip of faraway playing fields.
“Remember?”
The school they both attended, a decade and more ago. They can just make out the tiny figures of children racing about the cropped grass.
“Feels like another life,” says Alice.
“Down there, in that long field, that’s where I saw the farmer kill your gran’s dog. Toby Clore made me do that.”
“Whatever happened to Toby Clore?”
“God knows.”
“Did I ever tell you?” says Alice. “I’ve got another grandmother who lived in your house just after the war.”
“In our house?”
“They were called Avenell.”
“I never knew that.”
“And her mother was billeted in the big house in the war.”
Edenfield Place lies directly below them, a cascade of roofs and towers tumbling down to terraces and lawns and a bright lake. These days it’s a country house hotel, with a conference center and a spa.
“The grounds of the hotel, all round the lake, that was an army camp full of Canadians.”
It makes her giddy trying to fit all the parts together: as if she’s not one person with one life, but many people, men as well as women, a human chain, all holding hands, going back into the past.
“Look, see Newhaven over there? That’s where the troops set sail for Dieppe. Most of them died there or were captured. My great-grandfather got the Victoria Cross there. And over in that valley is the cottage where the old artist killed himself, the one who painted your sister. My grandmother knew him when he was famous.”
Turning back, she faces the wind again.
“And over there’s Seaford beach, where we sat on a bench and looked at the horizon, and said how we liked it because it went on forever.”
She doesn’t say it’s where they had their first kiss. But Jack hasn’t forgotten.
They set off walking again, their coats billowing in the breeze.
“All this storymaking,” she says. “The stuff you teach your class. What do you call it?”
“Narrative structure.”
“It’s got a lot to answer for. We want life to be like stories and it isn’t. There’s no beginning and no end. We want there to be, and we keep looking, waiting for the story to start. But it started long ago, and we’re in it.”
For a while they walk on in silence. They’ve not talked about how once they were lovers, and how they parted. The hurt and the guilt are past but not forgotten, just more links in the never-ending chain.
“You know, Jack,” she says, “you wear really boring clothes.”
“Do I?”
“You should let me come shopping with you. I could do you a makeover. You could look great.”
He turns to her and gives her one of his sweet, rueful smiles.
“You do realize it would still be me inside?”
“I can live with that,” she says.
23
The camera glides down a sunlit street, past white-painted houses where coral vine and morning glory climb trellised walls. The only sound is the slow wash of the ocean, a block to the south. This is Coconut Grove, Florida, and the year is 1932.
She sits in the shade of a green awning on the porch of a house called Matsuba: a lady in a broad-brimmed straw hat, a book resting in her hands, her eyes closed. The latch of the gate rattles in the still air as it gives way. Footsteps pass down the short path.
The lady in the straw hat opens her eyes. She shows no surprise.
“I’ve been waiting for you,” she says.
She rises slowly, with difficulty. She’s old now.
“Come in,” she says. “Out o
f the heat.”
She moves with a limp, slightly dragging her right foot. There’s a parlor at the back, a cool white space with windows onto the green glare of a little garden. The old lady lives here alone.
“David’s in a nursing home.”
She sits herself in a cane chair, arranges white cushions for her comfort.
“He spends his time devising a system for eternal life. He calls it vital engineering.”
A faint smile lights up her lined face. A glimpse of the beauty that once set hearts racing.
“I’m quite sure he’ll outlive me,” she says.
She looks up shyly, searching for a face she has only ever seen in a photograph, the likeness of a sixteen-year-old girl. Instead she sees the ghost of a homely middle-aged woman who bears a passing resemblance to a man she once loved.
“I shall die soon,” she says. “I’ve always known we’d meet before the end.”
This is so. This is a visit of duty, and gratitude.
“My dear,” she says, not wanting to be thanked, “everything I did, I did for love.”
But there have been casualties.
She takes her limp right wrist in her left hand, and lifts it and lets it drop. She has never fully recovered from a stroke over twenty years ago.
I have come to seek forgiveness. I asked for too much love, from too many. She understands me.
“There’s nothing to forgive,” she says.
She points with her good left hand to the table before her, where there lies a book of poems.
“Austin left me long ago, but you have never left me. Not for a single day.”
She reaches for the book. Clumsily, she opens it to the flyleaf. Here she has written:
I’ve none to tell me to but thee
A true reader is a lover. This love story has now run its course.
“Read to me,” she says.
I take up the book and turn the pages, even though their author is long gone. As for this old lady, this vain and charming creature charged with the burden of a poet’s immortality, she too will soon be gone. But the words remain. I read to her.
This is my letter to the World
That never wrote to Me—
The simple News that Nature told—
With tender Majesty