Solsbury Hill A Novel (27 page)

The wind was calm. It was nothing like the wind on the moors. This wind was smooth and soothing. It was gentle on her face. And it felt almost warm, where her toes sank into the cold wet sand. Bare under her thick sweater and jeans, she had an urge to dive in, to swim, though the water must be freezing. She wanted to be naked in the North Sea. She rolled up her pants as far as they would go and went in as far as she could bear the cold.

The bay was not wide and when she got to the end of the sand, she walked on the promenade and then the rocky shoreline. The sea was grittier at this end, with barnacles and weeds. She’d picked up a walking stick and a handful of shells. They reminded her of her buttons, and she put them in her pocket thinking she’d drill tiny holes in the strongest, prettiest ones and sew them on her next batch of clothing.

It was dark when she got back to the hotel, night falling
early in Yorkshire. In the uncomfortable twin bed, she decided it didn’t matter about finding Martin Garrens. He might live in one of the Carolinas or in New York City, for all she knew. She was tired of hunting without a clue. There were four more people named Garrens in the book, but it was embarrassing to be on the prowl, to hear the suspicion at the other end of the line, to have no way of explaining herself.

Still she dialed the next number on the list. J. Garrens. As the phone rang she glanced and saw it was almost ten o’clock. She was about to hang up, when a woman’s voice answered.

“Hello,” said Eleanor. “I didn’t realize it was so late.”

The woman cleared her throat.

“I’m looking for a man named Martin Garrens.”

“Who is calling?”

“I’m sorry.”

“You have the right number—who’s calling?”

“My name’s Eleanor. Eleanor Abbott. Eleanor Sutton?”

There was a long pause. “Well, which one is it?” The woman’s voice was almost playful. “This is a pleasant surprise. Are you in Scarborough?”

“I am.”

“It’s late tonight, but might you be able to come for tea in the morning?”

Eleanor checked out of the small hotel and drove along Marine Drive, below the headland. She drove up
to the castle and walked beyond the ruins to the castle walls with a view of two beautiful bays and she thought how wise the kings and queens of medieval times had been, to choose this piece of property. Now, there was Luna Park with a Ferris wheel to the right, the harbor below, and a garish strip of awnings along Foreshore Road that looked like Coney Island. She felt the ominous gray of the day inside her, but then the sun popped out from behind the clouds and this seemed like a good sign.

Mrs. Garrens lived where Craven Street met Albion Road, at the junction, in an ordinary house. The interior was all grays and browns, nothing like the colorful dress, scarf, and shoes Mrs. Garrens wore. There was an umbrella stand and a coat stand and then an unlit staircase up to an even darker hall.

Eleanor didn’t have a coat and was still wearing yesterday’s jeans, but she slipped off her dusty Ugg boots and left them by the front door. Mrs. Garrens led her into the sitting room where there was a piano with a few framed photographs and a bay window but no view of the bay. On the settee in front of the window, she sat while Mrs. Garrens went into the kitchen to make a pot of tea. It seemed that no matter how recently tea or coffee had been taken, when a fresh moment came, there was more tea poured and with the tea there was always a plate of biscuits.

Eleanor fidgeted and felt anxious. If she’d felt old the previous afternoon in the hotel, she felt ancient that morning,
sitting in a colorless room on a gray day with an elderly lady. She took a chocolate digestive biscuit and nibbled at the edge of it.

“You came all this way.”

Eleanor nodded.

“Have you had a good stay?”

“I’ve just been here one night. I stayed at a little hotel across from the beach.”

“The North Bay. Have you visited the castle?”

“I did. Yesterday the gate was closed, but I went up there this morning.”

“It’s true, it would have been closed yesterday, but you had a chance to see it. I’m glad.” Mrs. Garrens looked like a parrot the way she moved her head, the tightness in her mouth like a beak, the gaudy clothes she was wearing. “I think it’s good you’re here,” she said to Eleanor. “I think it’s a good sign.”

It sounded like a bad sign.

“I’m sorry I called so late last night. I didn’t realize. I came here looking for Martin Garrens, but I don’t know him, didn’t know how to find . . . I looked in the phone book. There were seven or eight, actually.”

“Oh, my.” Mrs. Garrens tugged at the string of pearls around her neck. “I thought maybe Alice had said something.”

“Alice, no, she didn’t say anything. Then you know Alice . . . Are you Martin Garrens’ wife?”

“No, goodness no, dear.” In an instant something softened in Mrs. Garrens’ face. “You must have come to visit Alice.”

“I don’t know if you knew that she was sick recently.”

“I read it in the paper, that she passed. I’m sorry.”

Eleanor knitted her fingers. “So, I’m here in England because I came to visit Alice, to meet her, really. I live in New York.” She heaved a sigh of exasperation.

“What moved you to call me?”

“Coming to England, I found some letters in my mother’s things and some of them were from a Martin Garrens, from Scarborough, so I came.”

“I see.”

“I have to admit, I’m really at a loss here.”

Mrs. Garrens went to the piano, picked up one of the frames, walked slowly back across the room, and handed it to Eleanor.

The frame was heavy, old and made from silver. The picture was faded. The young woman in the picture had curled blond hair that reached the top of her jeans. A thick leather belt was cinched tight at her waist, and she wore a loose paisley blouse. Next to the young woman stood a clean-cut, handsome man fat with joy. They both looked filled to bursting. That was all she saw.

“Do you recognize your mum?” Mrs. Garrens said.

Eleanor looked more carefully and her heart jumped seeing the unmistakable eyes and the way her mother always
stood with her right leg akimbo, a familiar self-conscious smile on her face. It was almost the face Eleanor remembered.

She looked up at Mrs. Garrens, but didn’t like what she felt in the room. All confused, in Scarborough, on a Wednesday morning.

“I do,” Eleanor said.

“It’s your mother and Martin.”

Eleanor looked more closely at the picture.

“That’s Martin Garrens.”

“It is.” She sat down beside her.

It was an uncomfortable sitting room. All the chairs were a little too far from any table, so you had to reach to pick up or put down your teacup or reach for another cookie. The chairs looked as hard as folding chairs and the couch was not only firm, but the material that covered it made Eleanor’s skin itch right through her clothing.

The couple in the photograph leaned against a convertible car that was parked in a wide driveway. There was a stone house in the background, and it looked like summer, because there were flowers in pots and the man was dressed in a short-sleeved shirt and shorts. The man wore sandals.

“My mother lived here in Yorkshire, I know.” Eleanor was trying to find a story in the picture. “I assume that’s Trent Hall behind them,” she said. With a shallow layer of tears on the surface of her eyes, she looked at Mrs. Garrens.

“I assume you came because you want to know.”

Eleanor nodded.

“Your mother and father . . .”

“I don’t think my father was ever in England. I mean, I’m sure he wasn’t, unless he didn’t tell me. He’d never been to England, and my mother wanted him to come here.” Eleanor felt a sense of panic rise.

Mrs. Garrens now looked like an owl. Her fat face became the most pleasant face Eleanor had seen in a long while. It was a yielding face and now it was broad and Eleanor saw the round, brown eyes—clear and unaffected as a child’s. She smelled of talcum powder, lipstick, and Yardley perfume.

“I should go,” Eleanor said.

“You can certainly go,” said Mrs. Garrens. Eleanor didn’t get up. Mrs. Garrens offered her another biscuit. Comforting and nourishing and sweet, all in one round cookie.

“You’re a dear girl. May I say that?” Mrs. Garrens waited.

Eleanor’s almost imperceptible nod.

“Put your feet up.” Mrs. Garrens seemed to know her. Eleanor tucked her feet under herself on the couch.

Eleanor hadn’t noticed how deep was Mrs. Garrens’ voice, and when she spoke, it was as if she had candies in her mouth that she moved around without letting them get in the way of her well-enunciated words.

“I don’t know which place to begin, because I suspect now you’ve managed to work it out. More or less.”

“I don’t know what you mean. I haven’t worked anything out . . .”

Mrs. Garrens looked around the room as if she were looking for something more to give to Eleanor. She sat forward, turned her body, her hands folded in her lap. She had a sad and hopeful thin smile on her face as she went on, “Your mother and my son Martin, they knew each other as children.”

“Right. That part.”

Mrs. Garrens took Eleanor’s hand, as if it were the most natural thing to do, as if she had comforted Eleanor’s confusion since she was a small girl.

“Martin loved your mother with all his heart and there was a time when she loved him, too.” She waited a bit. “I see him in you.” Now, Mrs. Garrens’ eyes welled with tears. “I’m your grandmother.”

Eleanor turned away. She studied the face of the man in the frame, the man who stood, casual and at ease, beside her mother. “I came here looking for him, because I found some letters from him to her. I never had reason to wonder, to ask her. My mother died when I was young.” She looked at Mrs. Garrens. “I think I wish I hadn’t come. This is more than I was prepared for.”

Tired beyond words, she thought of her own father, John Abbott, who had loved and raised her. “I never met him, did I?” Then Eleanor remembered a memory, a fragment that held itself at the edge of her sight almost all the time, a puzzle she’d just set aside.

There had been a man at the pier in Los Angeles. A friend
of her mother’s, who had watched her on the Ferris wheel, and then taken them for tacos. She had tasted the salty rim of his margarita.

“God, I did meet him, didn’t I? I did.” From one edge of her eyes to the other, both eyes let forth a smooth wash of water on her cheeks, around her nose, over her lips, and dripping from her chin onto the sweater.

With hardly a sound, she cried, except she kept repeating, “I did, I did.”

He had stood watching them ride the Ferris wheel. The ocean was behind him and seagulls were everywhere, screaming. Every time the wide chair came down and swept close to the ground and then back to go around again, she saw the man watching them. There was a lost look on his face and he frightened her a bit, until when they climbed off, her mother introduced him as a friend and pretended it was a strange coincidence he should be there. Eleanor had known she was pretending.

He had taken Eleanor’s young hand and bent forward in a gentlemanly bow. He might have said she was pretty or lovely or called her a princess, and then he had suggested they get Mexican food somewhere, and there was a place right at the end of the pier.

Her mother had been happy on that trip to California. They had seen him again. He’d invited them to the opera
Carmen
, and they’d dressed up. That night her mother had slipped out of the hotel room and come in very early in the
morning, but Eleanor was too young to think anything of it till now.

Eleanor’s face was wet, but she’d stopped crying. Her mouth was open so she could breathe as pictures streamed through her mind like she was watching a movie. There was nothing Mrs. Garrens could do but witness it. A mountain of silent compassion, she held Eleanor’s hand.

“Well.” A deep inhale and the handkerchief wasn’t adequate to the job, so Eleanor dabbed her face with the arm of her sweater, which made both women laugh and broke up the awfulness. “Well, some things make more sense now.” Eleanor had a good enough heart that she could laugh.

“I’ve been reading letters, meeting . . .” She decided against telling Mrs. Garrens about the ghosts. “Learning things from every direction, and all the time, this is what I came to find.” She sniffled and stood. “I think I should go now. I’m going to walk to my car and drive home now, but maybe we can meet. Another time.” She was drenched in sadness. “You know, the craziest part of all this is that I’m going back to that big house that’s supposed to be mine. You know the house, right? You must have known my mother for a long time.” Eleanor sniffed and ran her fingers through her hair, wrapped it into a bun, and looked for her glasses. Mrs. Garrens handed them to her. Just after another sniffle Eleanor said, “Well, I suppose I’ll stay long enough to meet him.”

Mrs. Garrens’ bust rose and fell and her eyes closed in a sad, slow way.

“Oh, God, I shouldn’t meet him?” Eleanor said.

“I think you should sit for a bit more. If I may say, I think it would be better to stay a little longer.”