Clay dropped the rock suddenly and put his hand to the back of his neck. His fingers were long, his nails well-trimmed, his forearm dusted with light hair. His other hand sat on his hip. I looked past him toward the sea, but his body now blocked my view of Joseph in his sailboat, and I didn’t want to rise and startle him, so close as he stood to the edge of the cliff.
I said, “It was probably just the excitement of the day. She loves you very much.”
“Does she? Did she say that?”
“Well . . . not in so many words.”
He made a mournful laugh. “Thanks for the honesty.”
I didn’t know what to say. I hardly knew him at all, him or Isobel. I had the feeling I’d walked onto the stage of a play, sometime in the middle of the second act, and assumed a leading role. And I had no script, no story. I didn’t even know the name of this play. Was probably wearing the wrong costume. I leaned back on my hands and stared at the long, vertical creases down the back of Clay’s shirt. The sun burned the top of my head, my hands, the back of my neck. A gull screamed from the rocks down below.
“Vargas!” Clay exclaimed.
I startled up. “What? Where?”
“The lighthouse keeper’s son. Fellow who was with you last night. Don’t deny it. Vargas?”
“Joseph. Yes.”
“I think he’s in love with her.”
The sentence struck in the middle of my chest. I stepped to one side, in order to find Joseph’s sailboat on the stretch of empty sea before us. For a second or two, I thought he’d been swallowed by the water, but when I shielded my eyes and looked farther, I saw he had only angled around the eastern tip of the Island to tack down the other side. The boat was smaller now. You couldn’t make out Joseph himself, just the white, triangular sail against the navy water, as it began to disappear behind the land’s edge. I caught my breath again and said, “How do you know?”
“Oh, he’s always been crazy about her. Used to hang around the house when they were small. Take the dinghy back and forth. They had some kind of signal they used to send each other, through the windows.”
“But she doesn’t feel the same way. She’s engaged to you, not to him.”
“Another man’s ring isn’t going to stop a fellow like that.”
“I don’t think—” I checked myself.
“Don’t think what?”
“I just think he’s more honorable than that.”
“Do you? Well, I’ve known him all my life, and I wouldn’t put it past him. Not the way he’s been pining for her all these years. Sitting there in his lighthouse, watching her from the window, beckoning her over to see him.”
The tip of the sail winked out past the edge of the cliff.
“Then Isobel should put a stop to it,” I said. “Especially if it hurts you.”
“Oh, it doesn’t hurt me. Not a bit. A fellow like that . . .” Clay turned to face me, and his expression was so haggard, the lines so deep and painful in his fresh, young face, I forgot my anger. He took my shoulder under his hand. “It’s Izzy I’m worried about. She’s impulsive, she’s—she trusts him, God knows why. It’s because he’s not one of us. He’s—well, she knows she can’t marry him, and you know how it is with girls—” He broke off and—perhaps realizing how tightly he was gripping my shoulder—let his hand drop to his side, where he shoved it into his pocket. “And he loves her. He’s crazy about her. Last night. I should’ve—man, I should’ve gone over there myself, I should’ve socked him. If I’d known, I would have.”
“I’m glad you didn’t. Nothing happened, Clay, nothing at all. She was—we were both a little tipsy, from the champagne and all, and he was worried about us and rowed us back home. That’s all. Joseph did a good thing.”
“He could have telephoned me. I would’ve fetched her back.”
“Do they have a telephone out there?”
“Sure they do. Underground cable.”
“I didn’t realize.”
“There’s a lot you don’t realize.” He swiveled back to the sea. Ran a hand through his hair and shoved it in his pocket, like the other hand, good and deep. “Mr. Fisher—God bless him—he’s indulged her all these years. I don’t blame him. She’s had it tough, with that mother of hers, and—well and everything else. But he’s not here to protect her just now, and I hope— I don’t mean to ask you to sneak around for me, nothing like that, but I just— If you could let me know if she’s in trouble, that’s all. If she’s about to do something stupid.”
I pictured that engagement ring, three or four carats dangling above the sapphire water. “She’s not going to do anything stupid,” I said. “And if she is, I don’t think I could stop her.”
“I could. I could stop her. If you just let me know how she’s doing, what she’s doing.” He pulled his left hand out of the pocket and checked his watch. “I’ve got to be back at the firm tomorrow, but I’ll be back up here as often as I can, believe me. I’ll give you my number in the city. Call me at any time. Collect, if you need to.”
“I’m sure that won’t be necessary.”
Clay reached out and took my hand, very gently, the way he’d been taught.
“I’m just grateful you’re here, Miranda. I’m just grateful Izzy’s got someone like you around at last, a proper female influence, someone steady and sensible.”
“Thank you,” I said dryly.
Clay leaned forward and pressed my hand hard and kissed my cheek, cutting me off. He smelled of sunshine and perspiration, and his cheek, brushing mine, was hot and damp.
“Just keep her busy, all right?” he said. “For God’s sake, just keep her away from that Vargas.”
15.
Isobel drove home from the Monks’ house at a crawl, because she’d drunk so much gin and tonic over bridge, and the road, I think, was playing tricks on her. Overhead, the sky was gray and troubled, and a few fat drops of rain smacked against the windshield. Isobel switched the wipers on and off and peered up to check the state of the clouds.
“Peaches, darling,” she said. “Do you know what I hate most about the Island and everybody in it? Except you, I suppose.”
“What’s that?”
“Nobody ever says what they really mean. There is this vast fabric of tender little lies, and all the important things are unspoken. Boiling there underneath. We only bother telling the truth when it’s too small to count.”
“I don’t think that’s true at all.”
“You haven’t been here long enough. It’s like a sport, it’s the only real sport they know, and because I love sports I play them at their game, but I hate it. If I had my horses, now . . .”
“Why don’t you?”
“There isn’t room. Poor dears, they’re on Long Island, getting fat.” She paused to negotiate a sharp curve, surging and slowing the Plymouth as if she couldn’t decide her approach. She was a wholly different driver when drunk, I thought, and as I watched the bony grip of her hands on the wheel, fighting the turn, I wondered if I should offer to take over. Before I could work up the nerve, she straightened out the car and said, “Don’t you ever miss Foxcroft?”
I turned my head to stare out the window at the meadow passing by, the occasional driveway marked by stone pillars. The air was growing purple with some impending downpour, and I felt its approach in my gut. “I haven’t been gone long enough.”
“I do. When I was there, I couldn’t wait to leave. All those books and rules and studying. But now I think, at least there was something new every day. Here, everything’s the same. The same damned summer, over and over, the same day, the same people, the same small talk, the same small sports and parlor games and lies, of course. There’s no escape.”
“It’s only a few months. Sometimes it’s nice to spend a few months doing nothing.”
“But then in September we go back to the city and do nothing there. What hope is there? Tell me, Miranda. I really want to know.”
I turned to stare at her sharp profile, and fo
r the first time I noticed a tiny bump along the bridge of her nose, as if she’d broken it some time ago. “You might have gone to college,” I said.
“That’s just putting off the inevitable. Beside, I’m not like you. Books bore me. All your Shakespeare and Dickens and old men like that. Marriage is going to bore me even more.” She opened the window a few inches and tossed her spent cigarette into the draft. “My God, I should’ve been born ten years earlier.”
“Why?”
“Why, because of the war. I’d have trained as a nurse or a Resistance agent, I’d have been splendid at that. I’d have made some use of myself, some purpose. It would have transformed me. I’d never have been the same, I would have had no tolerance at all for this.” She waved her hand at the Island. “I don’t understand how everybody could come back from the war and just sit there with a gin and tonic and play bridge. God, what a drag. It’s like they’ve all gone to sleep.”
“Because it wasn’t an adventure, Isobel. It was hell. People died.”
“Oh, that’s right. I’m sorry. Your father.” She paused respectfully. We had reached the Greyfriars drive, and she began to slow in preparation for the turn. Another handful of raindrops smacked the windshield. The drive was bordered with giant, mature rhododendrons, transported at great cost from the mainland—Isobel had told me how much as we drove away this morning—so that you couldn’t see the house until you rounded the last curve, so that you found yourself straining and straining as you approached your destination. Now Isobel drove even more slowly, a walking pace, while I checked the sky and the windshield and clenched the muscles of my abdomen.
Isobel waited until she began the last turn before she continued. “Still. You’d think they couldn’t stand all this shallow hypocrisy, after what they’d been through. And yet they embrace it. They want it to stretch on into infinity, never changing, never deviating one square inch from the old, dull, habitual ways. Marrying suitable boys you don’t really love, having children you don’t really want. I tell you, I can’t stand it any longer. I’m about to explode, Miranda, but nobody knows it yet. Nobody but you. Just watch. I’m going to . . .”
Her sentence drifted off, as if she’d lost her train of thought. I looked up and followed her gaze, and at first I saw nothing amiss, nothing out of order. Greyfriars rambled before us in its immaculate, elegant way, not a window out of place, gray shingle meeting white trim and green lawn. The grass, the young trees, the rosebushes, the neatly fenced kitchen garden, the tall boxwoods guarding the swimming pool—all these features as tidy as money could make them. Only the gathering rhythm of the rain disturbed the expensive Fisher tranquillity.
Then I noticed the front door, which was open, and the person leaning against the doorway, smoking a cigarette attached to a long black holder. A woman wearing a magenta dress, a towering hairdo, and a large white flower pinned above her right ear.
“My God. Who’s that?” I asked.
Isobel switched off the ignition and rested her arms on the top of the steering wheel. A prolonged rumble of thunder shook the windows. The woman straightened from the doorway and beckoned us with her cigarette in its holder.
In a voice of wonder, Isobel said, “It’s my mother.”
16.
“Call me Abigail,” the Countess said, as I stumbled over her foreign title, which I couldn’t quite remember. “Everybody else does. Even my children.”
“Do they really?”
“Just watch.” She turned to Isobel, who had hung behind me as we raced across the gravel and ascended the steps in the gathering deluge, and now rolled her eyes as her mother embraced her dripping body. “Hello, darling. You look as beautiful as ever, of course. Except you really must eat more. People who don’t eat are simply boring, and it’s far better to be fat than boring, believe me.”
“Hello, Abigail,” Isobel said. “What a delightful surprise.”
Up close, the Countess was even more extraordinary than from across the driveway. There was nothing dainty about her. She was tall and broad-shouldered, and her dress of magenta silk billowed down her heavy bones to sweep the ground, interrupted only by a sash at her waist, which—somewhat contradicting her earlier injunction—was not fat but certainly sturdy. She wore several glittering necklaces and her hair, swept up in a pompadour, had already turned silver, though her face was still smooth. I think it hardly needs saying that her lipstick was the same color as her dress, and that a glass of gin and tonic rested in her other hand—the one not occupied with cigarettes—bearing a neat half-crescent of said lipstick on its rim. When she turned, as she did now, leading us from the foyer and down the hall, she revealed a narrow, gathered cape of magenta silk that drifted from the swooping neck of her gown to form a train behind her.
“I’ve taken the liberty of reserving a table at the Club for dinner,” she said, over her shoulder, “but that’s not for ages, so I’ve ordered tea on the terrace.”
“I expected nothing less.”
“I’ve taken my old room, of course, which doesn’t seem to be occupied. Where has all the staff gone, darling? We used to have three times as many housemaids running around. I had to shout for help, and I dislike shouting. It’s barbaric.”
“Housemaids don’t grow on trees anymore, Abigail,” Isobel said, walking past her mother to burst through the doors to the terrace, where a table and chairs had been arranged under the shelter of the porch while the rain poured beyond. A newspaper and a jeweled cigarette case lay next to the tea tray, and Isobel snatched up the case and flipped it open. “You can’t imagine how much servants cost. Especially on the Island.”
“In France, they’re dirt cheap. Everything’s dirt cheap. You ought to move there with me, as I’ve told you a thousand times.”
Isobel lit her cigarette and turned. “My French is terrible, Abigail.”
The Countess snorted and turned to me. “Tell me about yourself, dear. You’re Francine’s daughter, of course. Lovely Francine, I couldn’t ask for a better wife for Hugh.”
“She’s a dear,” Isobel said.
The Countess waved her hand at Isobel. “No. I want to hear from Miranda. You and me, we have a way of drowning out other women who aren’t as self-absorbed. And Miranda’s not self-absorbed, are you, darling?”
“She is,” Isobel said, “just in a different way. But everybody’s self-absorbed in his own way. Being charitable is just its own form of self-absorption.”
“Quiet!” thundered her mother, and Isobel plopped onto a wicker chair and gave me a droll look.
“I don’t know what to say, actually,” I said. “What do you want to know?”
“What do you like to do, child? What do you like to read?”
“Shakespeare,” supplied Isobel.
The Countess whipped around. “Go inside. Just go inside. Or else remain absolutely, positively silent.”
Isobel lifted her hand, zipped her lips, and stuck a cigarette between them.
The Countess turned back to me. “I apologize. I’m afraid I had very little to do with her upbringing, which was not my choice. Now it’s too late. And you’re laughing at us, how despicable. Not that I blame you.”
I collapsed on another of the wicker chairs. “I’m sorry.”
“No, don’t apologize. You must never apologize unless absolutely necessary, although if you must apologize, do it properly. You like Shakespeare, do you?”
“Among other things.”
“What other things? Speak up, I can’t hear you above all that deluge.”
I raised my voice. “Books. Art.”
“Yes, but which books? Which art? This is terribly important. Do you prefer the Greeks or the Romans?”
“The Greeks.”
“Middle Ages or Renaissance?”
“Renaissance, but I like some bits of the Middle Ages. The Plantagenets.”
“Yes! Brutal but decisive, most of them. Chock full of sex appeal. I approve. Trollope or Dickens?”
“Trollope.” br />
“Chinese art or Japanese?”
“Japanese.”
“Verdi or Wagner?”
“Verdi. I can’t bear Wagner’s women. He doesn’t understand them.”
“What about Isolde?”
“She’s only there to exalt Tristan.”
“Brünnhilde?”
“That’s the exception. The only woman he actually makes wiser than the men. Except she ends up dead like the others. At least the music is revolutionary.”
The Countess turned to Isobel. “There, you see? I’ll bet I’ve found out more about her in two minutes than you’ve discovered in all those years at school.”
Isobel gestured to her lips.
“You may speak.”
“I was just going to say that I don’t give a damn about any of those things.”
The Countess frowned. “Why are you wearing that awful suit?”
“This? Because we went to church this morning, Peaches and I.”
“Peaches?”
“That’s her nickname. I gave it to her.”
“But why ever?”
“Because she’s sweet and round and delicious, of course. Just look at her.”
The Countess spun back to study me. She gave the business her whole attention, crossing her left arm under her breasts and propping her right elbow on the knuckles while she sucked thoughtfully on her cigarette. I tried to decide whether she was beautiful or not—certainly her face had the symmetry of beauty, the shapely eyes—but really she was something else. Not handsome or pretty or attractive, something beyond description, so that she held your attention, your dumbstruck admiration, without the slightest effort. Striking, that’s the closest word. You could say she was striking.
As she studied me studying her, she didn’t give any sign of what she was thinking, or what conclusions she drew from whatever figure I presented to her, in my ragged hair and ill-tailored suit and sunburnt face. The cigarette languished and died. She plucked the stub from the holder and tossed it into the ashtray and said to her daughter, “Whatever she is, she’s certainly not Peaches. Are we absolutely certain you’re mine, darling? It’s impossible to believe I’ve borne a daughter with so little penetration.”