Three Junes (6 page)

In the evenings, Maureen spoke effusively about her new arrangement, how the collies were progressing. She spoke about them respectfully, each as an individual with, already, full-blown talents, tics, unique ways of thinking. A breeder of Australian shepherds had written to say he’d like to visit in May; he’d like to watch her work the dogs. A farmer up north had called to ask the stud fee for Roy, who’d placed well at the nationals last summer. Colin, she said, was working hard with his flock. She had misjudged him; he was anything but a snob. “Nauseatingly posh exterior, I’ll give you that. But under all that varnish a heart of gold. And entertaining. He tells the most extraordinary stories—mostly about the war. In Africa . . . just imagine.” She stared pointedly at Paul. “You never do, you know. I hadn’t realized, but you never talk about the war—tell stories.”

“Maybe I haven’t got stories.”

Maureen looked at him as she would look at one of the boys when he made a flimsy excuse to get out of a chore. “Paul, everyone with a mouth and a memory has stories.”

“Colin Swift wears the war by not replacing his arm. You see the wound a mile away. Make that choice and you’re compelling the world to ask, ‘Dunkirk? Sicily?’ Compelling them to hear your stories.”

“I’m talking about you,” said Maureen angrily. “It’s almost like you were never there.”

Paul looked into the fire. “Maybe I wasn’t dismembered, Maureen, but I believe I was there.”

“That was rude, I’m sorry.” She took their plates to the kitchen. He listened to her rinse them in the sink, listened to her, slowly, take out new plates for the pudding. When she brought it out, she said, as if they’d never mentioned the war, “Colin’s a good student. I have to say I’m surprised. But then Flora’s a keen little bitch. We’re working her on the get-by, with her dad of course, and Rodney. But Flora—she’s caught on like it’s in her blood. Well it is, of course . . . but for a pup she’s so sure: she trusts you completely, she looks at you as if she reads your mind, she
knows
. You can see it in her ears . . . I had Roy part a ewe, and the way that girl watched,
listened
. . .” Maureen talked quickly, on and on, without touching her cake.

“Colin’s good to her?” asked Paul, thinking of the foxhounds lined up in Napoleonic ranks. If the collies were Paul’s, they’d live a fat, indolent life of lolling about by the fire, eating biscuits under the table, spending their nights at the foot of a bed. Paul’s childhood dogs had been nothing more than freeloading eager-to-please companions.

“For now he spoils her—keeps her in the house with those deranged terriers. But once it’s warm, she’ll go to the farm with her brother.”

When Maureen retreated to the kitchen again, Paul realized that they had passed an entire evening without speaking once of their children; most of her maternal instincts seemed to have turned toward the collies since his return, toward Betsey’s pups. Perhaps this was just because the boys were so seldom at home now; sometimes it felt as if David and Dennis came back to the house only to sleep. And it seemed truer than ever, as they grew older, that having each other rendered their parents obsolete except as providers.

It was not unusual for Paul to come home each evening to an empty house. If he walked out behind, he would see Maureen’s footprints, mingled with the dogs’, pointing left toward the farm or right toward Conkers. If he was home early, he might hear her whistle in the distance. Later, sometimes not until after dark, he’d see her returning along the path by the wall. She would come in exhausted, and Paul would rub her feet by the fire. Then the twins would come home and gallop around like ponies, fired up from football or cricket.

THE CAPTAIN ORDERS THEM BELOW,
where the air is hot, rancid, and smells of burning petrol. An hour out, they hear the rain turn to hail: the clattering overhead becomes a roar that drowns out all attempts at conversation. Now, except for the boat’s crew and Jack, everyone is sick. Even Jack looks gray. He sits on the other side of Fern, who leans down between her knees. The reeling of the boat throws her back and forth between the two men. Paul feels the heat of her legs through her skirt and wishes desperately for sun and calm. His lunch is long gone; to steady himself, he focuses on one of Fern’s white sneakers and her bare ankle above it.

There is something so girlish, so ingenuous, about her simple sneaker; without daughters, Paul has no idea what other shoes might seem more her age, but these do not. He saw shoes of various kinds, six months ago, at the Lockerbie crash site; shoes are so ubiquitous at catastrophic accidents that their image has become a cliché of pathos. That week, Paul vetoed at least half a dozen photographs of shoes. In the same week, he was asked to choose shoes for his wife to wear in her coffin (David’s wife did the actual choosing: something formal and black is all Paul remembers).

How often do Fern’s parents back in the reportedly pastoral Cornwall, Connecticut, stop to worry about her, consciously? When Fenno first went overseas—not the same as going to boarding school, where other parental people watched him, or to university, where hard studies were expected to keep him from harm—Paul would habitually subtract six or seven hours when he was going to bed each night and wonder what Fenno was doing in that foreign late afternoon. Would he, exactly now, be in the library (a good, safe place), or out on the streets marketing for dinner, or choosing a shirt to please a lover? And if Paul woke in the middle of the night, what he hated was imagining Fenno anywhere but dully in bed like his father.

In Connecticut, where it is now midmorning on a Saturday, whatever those other parents are doing, they couldn’t possibly be thinking that a man probably ten years their senior longs to spirit their daughter away, alone, take off her clothes, lie down beside her equally naked and forget every other need but this one. “Take advantage of her”? “Seduce her”? How would they think of it? When he pictures it that way, his desire for Fern becomes ridiculous. But her company, he argues with himself—that’s reasonable to want, simply that. He will start with that.

Abruptly, the hail stops. Gradually, the boat slows its feverish tilting. Jack climbs to the deck. He comes back down in a moment and stands over Paul and Fern, grinning. “You still alive there, girl?”

She gives him an impatient look. “I’m going up. I don’t care what the captain says.”

“All clear is what he says,” says Jack, and follows her up the steep stairs.

Paul sits alone a long time, perhaps fifteen minutes. He waits for his stomach to settle. He breathes deeply. He takes out a comb and runs it through his salt-stiffened hair.

When at last he goes up, he is surprised by the brightness. He shades his eyes and sighs with relief. The air is like a drug, fresh as new leaves. The deck shines, and a few unmelted hailstones lie about like jewels from a broken necklace. Several passengers, none from Paul’s group, are gathered at the bow, taking pictures of Paros against the retreating storm. One by one, they take turns standing in front of this view, posing. Paul does not see Fern. Heading back toward the captain’s cabin, he recognizes her laughter. He hears her say, “You’re an octopus,” and then sees her, behind the cabin, kissing Jack like a prodigal lover she thought she had lost for all time.

THE YEAR THE TWINS
followed their brother to boarding school, Flora placed first at an important trial in Ayrshire. Colin Swift’s foreman was her handler. Maureen took a younger dog to show, and Colin drove her up. They left at dawn and did not return until midnight. Maureen woke Paul to come downstairs and drink brandy. She and Colin had been celebrating already, out with their competitors. Paul could smell the cigarettes and whisky on her breath; in the mossy dark, he saw the shape of her lips after she kissed him and tasted fresh lipstick, its familiar mixture of talcum and fruit.

In the kitchen, they were heady with conceit, tripping over each other’s words to tell how the day had gone.

“The outrun was wretched, wretched—”

“A crooked course like a closed elbow, with two steep dips—”

“She came around fast as a cheetah.” Colin lifted his glass.

“But then the sheep closed up in a blinking knot.” Maureen squeezed one hand into a fist and brought it in toward her chest like a punch. “Made for the gate like they could taste it.”

“Taste it!” Colin exclaimed; the two of them laughed at this absurdity.

Maureen brought out another cigarette, to which Colin instantly offered a light. “A sight you can’t describe.”

Paul listened to the deft volley of their narrative—brilliant to them, silly and hopelessly confusing to him. He was glad for Maureen, proud of her. But he also saw, with the distance of his confusion, something new in her, new but old, something he might have seen years before had he chosen to see it. He saw her as he had first noticed her, tending bar at the Globe, so at home among all those men: men’s work, men’s words, men’s vanities like a sea she could navigate in any vessel, any season.

All that summer, the house was filled with noise and activity. There were more sheepdog trials, and the boys were underfoot again. Fenno was to start his first year at Cambridge. He read obsessively, huddled in corners, or brooded from room to room, complaining when his brothers invaded the house with their friends, raiding the larder before they went out to find whatever bathing hole or playing field they’d chosen as that day’s destination. When Fenno could no longer stand the close quarters with others, he would walk to the village, taking a book and one of the dogs. On a scorching afternoon late in August, Fenno went down with Silas. Silas, bounding ahead, found Flora, and with her the foreman from Conkers. Casually, in the kitchen as Maureen served dinner, Fenno mentioned the news from town. Colin Swift—wasn’t he master of Swallow Run, that character out of Fielding who seemed to change from one outlandish costume to another?—had been killed in his car in the morning fog, overtaking a lorry.

Colin’s funeral, a populous military affair, was on the front page of the
Yeoman
not far below a story on a series of IRA arrests. That week, the boys had to be packed up again. After their departure—never a smooth or easy parting—Paul went around the house retrieving bats and balls and shoes from under the furniture; picking up books where Fenno had left them, cast off in restless, open-faced tumbles, on windowseats, staircases, dining room chairs. As he set everything back in the proper shelves, he saw himself as the one in charge of restoring order, the one who comes after but never the first.

The next Saturday morning, so early the sun was still below the privet, Paul awoke to the hunting horn. No sound of hounds, which was odd—just the horn playing “Gone Away.” It was still summer, too early for opening meet. He realized that it must be a ritual, a requiem to the departed master. The horn changed melodies then—if melodies they could be called, all variations on the same inharmonious drone, much like the wail of bagpipes. This one was urgent: first steady, then quivering—a sob—then trailing away. Then came the huntsman’s voice, a long desperate wail like a war cry.

Maureen was not beside him in bed. This was not unusual, but Paul rose and went to the window, to see if she was out by the kennel.

She stood barefoot in the middle of the lawn, facing the fields, listening. The sun, as it cleared the top of the hedgerow, flashed on her still figure, showing her legs through her white cotton nightdress. Paul turned away from the window and went to the cupboard to find a clean shirt, moving slowly, with deliberate indecision.

In the kitchen, he saw Maureen at the scullery sink. She might have been preparing the dogs’ food, but she just stood there idly, staring out the window. Paul thought of the time he had found her there, equally motionless, drowning two of Betsey’s pups. But this time, when he put his hands on her shoulders and leaned around to see her face, it was clear that she had been crying. Paul stepped away from her, took the kettle from the cooker and filled it. He carried it back and lit the gas. He took two cups from their hooks. He willed himself not to speak first.

She said, without turning around, “I’ve been . . . ”

Paul saw how the dew had seeped up her nightdress all the way to her thighs. He saw blades of grass slicked to the backs of her heels, the wet haloes on the slate floor around her feet. He waited for her to say
unfaithful
or
deceiving you,
but of course she did not. She said, “ . . . out to check on the dogs. I thought I heard Betsey whining.”

“You were listening to the horn.”

“Yes. ‘Gone to Ground.’” She had turned around and was rubbing her eyes. She went to the cooker and cupped her hands over the kettle. “I’m dead tired. Do you mind if I go up and sleep just another hour?”

“I thought we might talk.”

“Please, Paul.” She looked him straight in the eye, plaintively. “Another time, whatever it is, I promise we will.”

Paul stepped aside and let her go up the back stairs. His heart felt like a flock of sheep outrun yet again by a good cunning dog, forced neatly into a cramped square pen.

THREE

A
LTHOUGH THE FERRY IS NOT SCHEDULED
to leave until eleven—and will almost certainly leave a good deal later—Paul’s suitcase is down in the lobby, his room key turned in, by eight o’clock. He wears a blue shirt which he washed by hand the night before and hung in an open window to dry. The sea spray and sun on the boat will smooth out the wrinkles acceptably. Such are my tiny preoccupations, Paul thinks grimly as he leaves the hotel: that I look as unwrinkled as possible.

He takes the more circuitous route to the harbor, choosing the lanes too narrow for cars, where an occasional donkey saunters by and the same interchangeable old women sit at their spinning wheels each morning, wearing black but spinning white. They grin at the tourists who take their pictures and wish everyone a good day. Today one of them waves at Paul as if she knows him. He waves back.

THE MORNING AFTER
Maureen’s funeral, when Paul opened the door to the library, Fenno looked up from Paul’s desk. Without betraying the slightest surprise or guilt, he held up the deed to the house. “Are you selling it?” Fenno’s voice was neutral, almost bemused.

“I don’t know.” Along with other papers, the deed had been in a folder tucked into the side of the blotter.

“Davey and Dennis would be crushed.”

“I know that. I’m not ignoring their sentiments. And you?”

Fenno laughed. “Do I have a say? I live across an ocean.”

“If you told me that coming here just once a year made a difference in your life, that would matter. It’s not that I can’t afford to stay.” Paul crossed the room to stand between the desk and the windows. Snow, falling swiftly, filled the room with a crisp even light. In it, Fenno looked pale and tired, and though Paul knew that he and his brothers had been up until dawn, talking and drinking, he couldn’t help trying to assess Fenno’s well-being. Would he be doing this constantly now? The thought exhausted him deeply.

As if guessing at the scrutiny, Fenno swiveled the chair and stood. The wall he now faced was covered with newspaper cuttings, award-winning stories in staggered states of acidic decay. The oldest, written when Paul was in his twenties, would have crumbled to dust if removed from their frames.

Fenno leaned close to one of the cuttings. “‘Mill Saw Tragedy Reversed.’” He read to himself for a moment, then turned to his father. “Dad, this is gruesome stuff.”

“It’s medical reporting, Fenno. It’s not sensationalism.” Paul smiled. He knew that Fenno was looking at a grainy photograph of an arm which, once severed, had been successfully reattached. The article had been one in a series on the kind of plastic surgery that had nothing to do with vanity. Paul remembered watching a seven-hour surgery in which a young girl’s fingers were meticulously re-fused to her hand, one spidery vein at a time. The surgeon’s talent made him think of the patient rigor of Old World embroidery.

Fenno turned to other articles, here and there smiling or raising an eyebrow. Paul knew that his chance to speak honestly was now or probably never.

Fenno walked back to the desk and picked up a packet of letters that had been in the folder with the deed. “What you do with the house is up to you, but you’re not getting rid of the collies.”

Two months ago, Maureen had given away three yearling puppies, but that left six dogs to care for. Two were trial champions; the others shared their bloodlines. The letters Fenno held were from Maureen’s files and contained the addresses of local farmers she had sold to in the past and other breeders she trusted. Paul had planned to invite them by, to take the dogs off his hands.

Paul lost his patience. “Oh, all right, so you, I suppose, you plan to take them back to New York and keep them in your city flat. Run them in some car park every day. Take them along to the shop so they don’t destroy your armchairs out of boredom.”

Fenno ignored his anger. “David can take two. We talked about it last night. And yes, Dad, I can take one; I’ll take Rodgie because he’s the youngest; he’ll do best on the flight. And the others . . . you have the space if you stay.”

“Well, I might want to travel. I might want to . . .”

“You can find someone to look after them when you’re gone. Pay that farm foreman over at Conkers to take them.”

“What if I’ve never cared for these dogs?”

“As likely as your never caring for Mum.”

Paul leaned into the window bay. Directly below, he could just see one of the birdfeeders they kept filled, even since Fenno’s absence. It hung like a pendulum from a dogwood tree, stilled by the weight of the snowfall. Across the burn, the kennel fence resembled lace. The dogs, nowhere to be seen, were probably hunkered away in their house, filling it with their feral warmth. “Fenno, this isn’t your business, really.”

“I think it is. I think anything you plan to do with something as much a part of Mum as her legs or her hands is very much my fucking business.”

“Well then, perhaps the dogs should be buried with her, Egyptian style.” Despite the cold radiating from the pane against his forehead, Paul’s face and neck burned. He thought about the potential vengeance he held in that packet of letters. He should be relieved Fenno hadn’t guessed at that. “Fenno, I hate it when you curse. For one thing, it’s affected.”

“I’m sorry. I’m worked up about this.” Fenno’s voice, softened, came from directly behind Paul’s back; its sudden proximity unnerved him.

Paul said, without turning around, “I just don’t want you, any of you, to expect me not to change anything. I don’t want you to treat me like the curator of your mother’s memory.”

“And I just don’t want you to do anything on impulse.”

“Maybe a little impulse would do me good,” said Paul, and it was right then, looking into the snowflakes, deliberately blinding himself with their brightness, that he thought of Greece. A fleeting notion, but one he grasped like a root reaching toward a swimmer tumbled over and over by a fierce rogue current.

“What would do you good, Dad, is a little self-pity. Suffer and whine a bit, would you please? I’m not joking. And then, I don’t know, start going to parties. Make the small talk you hate or roll up your sleeves and pry into other people’s lives. Stop standing back all the time. Stop being so . . . sober.”

Paul smiled at the withheld obscenity. “The American approach to bereavement: martini therapy.”

“Right now, you could use American anything,” Fenno said tartly. “Why don’t you come for a visit? You’ve never come for a visit.”

Paul heard the packet of letters fall back on the desk. When Fenno next spoke, Paul could tell he was standing in the doorway. “This is just me speaking, you know. Me blowing off steam. I’m not some kind of . . . delegate. Just so you know, so you don’t feel . . .”

Paul turned around. “Ganged up on?”

Fenno’s smile erased the fragility Paul had read into his face. “I’m going downstairs to make coffee for Mal. He claims to hate the colonial implications of tea.”

Paul looked down at the birdfeeder, trying to gauge from the snow on its miniature roof how much had fallen. Fenno and his friend were to fly to New York late that night—though in the wake of Lockerbie (which would hold the headlines, Paul knew, for weeks to come), bad weather seemed the least of a traveler’s worries.

Fenno had always been conscientious; in that way, he was very much an oldest child. Impulse, Paul thought, was even more foreign to his son’s constitution than it was to his own. He thought everything through to its every consequence, trivial or major. He saw the details others neglected to see (what he had seen between his parents, Paul did not want to know). Just now, Fenno had said he would take the youngest dog. Rodgie was two; if he lived a good, hardy collie’s life, he’d depend on Fenno another ten years. Fenno would have thought that out.

“WELL HALLOO THERE,
if it isn’t
you
—and where’s our peerless leader?” Marjorie emerges from a wide straight road that intersects Paul’s rugged lane. She carries a large cardboard box awkwardly fitted with a twine handle. “On your way to breakfast? I could eat a Trojan horse—ha, so to speak.”

“Let me take that,” says Paul, and she gladly hands over her box. He has no choice but to join her.

“I thought I’d never get this picked up,” she says. “It would have been an absolute tragedy! The hours these merchants keep—or don’t keep—are jolly scandalous. I applaud their sense of leisure, but to a
point
.” Marjorie does not wait to be seated by the waiter who greets them but chooses a table right by the water, one which would almost certainly have gone to a local. “One—no, two,
dio
—of those wonderful ice coffees—
kafess tou pahgoo
. . . oh dear, I’ve probably asked for a pair of cold flannels. . . .” She then names, or tries to name, something else. The waiter smiles at her Greek, but kindly, and points to some pastries on a nearby table. “Yes, those, exactly. Thank you,” Marjorie says, nodding vigorously. She turns to Paul. “There. These boys are jolly nice, so long as you have a go at their language. However mangled your going at it may be!”

They talk about the remainder of their trip: Santorini, Crete, a last night at some deluxe hotel in Athens. Marjorie can’t wait for Knossos; this, she thinks, will be the apotheosis of their journey. She hopes they’ll see dolphins on the ferry this time; so far, they haven’t. She wonders if this is a sign that the Aegean is hopelessly polluted. No one would tell them, of course, if it was. She talks on and on, and Paul listens.

“I’ve bought so many beautiful things, but this is the pièce de
résistance. Let me show you.” She wrenches the twine from her box and opens it.
Out of the raffia she pulls a brightly painted ceramic bowl, crisscrossed with
orange, green, and purple patterns, an octopus painted inside. “Eight of these,
and a big one to match—each one has a different pattern, they’re so whimsical,” she says, insisting that Paul take the bowl and examine it. “Isn’t that a pleasing shape?”

“Yes, very pleasing.” He hands it back.

“And you, what are you taking back?”

Paul sighs. “I’m not much of a collector.” More truthfully, he might have said that he had come here not to take memories away but to leave them behind, to bring some of the ones he already has and drop them like stones, one by one, in the sea.

“A shame. You should see the marvellous things I’ve collected; I always take an extra suitcase for my loot. When I go back, I make exhibits in school for the children. Gives me a little tax write-off too.”

Paul watches the boats tug their moorings and thinks of his fantasy on the way to Delos: setting himself adrift from island to island. Or choosing one and staying indefinitely. He remembers how he mentioned this to Fern and wonders if that’s when he made a fool of himself, if that’s when he suddenly looked his age to her. On the other hand, what a youthful, unlikely thing it would be for Paul to abandon the tour. He would be a deserter. He has never, after all, deserted anyone or anything. He has been a good lieutenant, a more-or-less obedient heir (at the very least producing three more), a patient husband; in all eyes but Fenno’s, perhaps, a dependable father. A shepherd, just as Fern suggested.

Paul has acted, always, as if life must predict itself step by step or all hell will break loose. Is the wild dream so unreasonable—jolly scandalous, as Marjorie might righteously say? What if, after all these years, it’s circled back into reach?

He remembers dinner last night: the looks on everyone’s faces when Jack bolted his food and left, claiming he had errands to run—errands at ten o’clock in a town where only the one discotheque and a few bars would be open for business. There were whispers of
scandalous
then. The quadruplets huddled and giggled and nudged one another with their sandaled feet. Ray said that he would complain to the tour company back in London. But Jack is Jack: he has probably got away with worse crimes than running off for a night to sleep with a girl. Some people have an inborn buoyancy, an immunity to being held accountable.

Too easily, Paul sees Jack’s brown hand like a starfish on Fern’s rosy, freckled back, his mustache chafing her neck. To supplant this vision, he looks at the harbor, concentrates on a sloop, its sails furled, gliding straight toward him. So what if he were to retire from the paper, even sell it; what if he were to travel alone for a year? What if he were to say to Fenno, All right, the house and the dogs will stay, but
you
take them on.

Paul recognizes this immediately for the false wish it is: not just to call Fenno home but to make him see his father’s life from within. The house could simply be closed for a time, or let; the dogs, as Fenno suggested, sent over to board at the farm.

“Yoohoo in there,” says Marjorie, her face a few inches from his.

“What?” he says, embarrassed at his absence.

She touches his arm, the way she did the first morning in Athens, extolling the benefits of time. “Oh listen, you do deserve to drift. I understand completely about the drifting; back then I called it the supposings. You know: supposing this; supposing that. I did a lot of it back then.”

“When?” Paul is startled by how much she knows. He’s only beginning to realize what a good traveler she is.

“When my farm burned down. Before I taught real school, I had a horse farm, a riding school, and the whole thing burned to the ground, not a single animal saved. I could probably have replaced it—insurance, I’m good about those things—but each horse . . . no, I couldn’t possibly. So that’s how I started on my rovings. Next winter, I’ll see the Yucatán.” As she delivers this oddly cheerful speech, Marjorie repacks her box of bowls. When she’s finished, she sits back to enjoy the sun, which has moved just high enough to touch their table. “I
was
a crack hand at dressage.”

This thought seems to leave her more satisfied than wistful. And then she changes course again, suddenly raising her hands above her head and exclaiming, “Oh it is not for me, it seems, to touch the sky with my two arms!”

“What?” says Paul again, but now he’s laughing. “Marjorie, you’re losing me at every turn.”