Solsbury Hill A Novel (28 page)

Anne went on impact. Martin was gone but didn’t die till almost a week later. His heart was strong, the doctors had said.

Went and gone and passed. The impact intense. It was a lorry that had hit them. A runaway lorry. None of the words made any sense as they rattled in Eleanor’s head like a lurid chant.

Mrs. Garrens sat still and asked nothing of her. She let her be silent and in the silence Eleanor remembered being in her family’s living room when she was twelve. Her homework page, she could see it as if it were present. The grain of the wood table made her pen stick, so she put a book underneath the page and eavesdropped on her parents’ conversation. He was irritated that Anne had to go. There was a concert and a reunion of people who’d known each other, but her father, John Abbott, was not being asked to go. “You said not to let you go to Yorkshire without me,” he reminded her. Eleanor remembered the strange tone in her mother’s voice when she said, “It’s different now.” And he didn’t go.

Coming out of her reverie, Eleanor asked, “What was the concert they were going to?”

“The concert?”

“My parents were talking about it, before my mother came here.”

“Ah, that, yes, it was the reunion of a concert they’d been to thirteen years or so before. They all got together that summer, friends from years ago. They came from all over, but Annie came the farthest, and there was a small concert, in memory of the great Free Festivals at Stonehenge. That’s where they were.”

“Right,” Eleanor said, “that’s what they were talking about. They were going to a reunion of what—what were the Free Festivals?”

“They were something like your Woodstock,” Mrs. Garrens said. “Music and young people roamed around amid the ancient stones. It was a great big concert. Your mother had come back to visit—she hadn’t been back since she left at fourteen—and it was the last concert they let them have there at Stonehenge, before they closed the place to protect the stones. Anne was already engaged to your father, to John, by then. They were young still, little more than teenagers. She had been in America for a long time, but for Martin, Annie was his only love. His whole life, Annie was.”

“His soul,” Eleanor said without inflection.

Mrs. Garrens got up and walked in small circles.

“That summer when she came back from America, they ran about, almost like they were running from something. They’d both been to college, but they played like kids, like puppies. They swam in the ocean from here to Whitby, had
picnics with friends, went a little crazy with the feeling that something important was ending.”

“How do you know I’m his?”

“They knew you were theirs,” Mrs. Garrens said.

“Did my father know?”

“John? I don’t think so, no. He didn’t know.”

“I think he knew, at the end.” Eleanor’s voice was frail.

“Yes, he might have known then.”

“Why didn’t she stay here and marry Martin?”

Mrs. Garrens hesitated. She wanted to get it right though she wasn’t certain of the answer. “She loved John. I don’t think she knew she was pregnant when she left. She went back and married him, just as they’d planned.”

Her mother had had a choice between two men. Her mother couldn’t inherit the house and didn’t wear the ring. Eleanor’s head was spinning with superstition, facts, and nonsense. What she’d lost and what she’d gained. She wiggled the ring off her finger and held it in her fist, slipped it in the pocket of her jeans.

“Eleanor, you know it was heaven for her, being a mother to you. She talked about you all the time, that last time she came, all about you and what you were doing, that last summer. You were just a young girl then.”

Eleanor chewed the inside of her cheek, nodded. She felt cold creeping through her as the facts fell into place. “So what happened, exactly?”

“Well, as I said, there was the reunion. Anne and Martin
decided to drive together, just the two of them in his car, down to Stonehenge. It was a crowd of them that went, but Anne and Martin went in his car. I don’t know what they were doing. I don’t know what they were thinking. I wasn’t privy to most of it.”

The room had turned as dark as a thundercloud, but a heater close to Eleanor’s legs glowed with red stones. There was something about England that held her, not in a warm way, always, but still it held on to her even when tossing her about. She’d found one father, lost a vision she’d had of her mother, and lost her true father in some way. She’d grown stronger, not just physically, not just from the exercise of walking against fierce shifts in wind on the moors, but psychically, she’d grown more vulnerable, accessible, exposed.

Even though it was gray and cold, even with awful things coming and going, she felt something balancing. Something moving in the right way, unstuck and unwinding like the swing on the hill with its arc all wild and uncanny.

“After the reunion, Anne and Martin decided to stay the night in Bath. The next day, they went for a picnic, went back to the place they’d been to all those years before, a picnic up on Solsbury Hill. A beautiful field where they’d been together, when they were still young, when your big soul first stepped into the world.”

With tiny movements, Eleanor shook her head.

It might have been the first time Mrs. Garrens had had a chance to tell the story, and so, after clearing her throat again,
she went on, “It was late afternoon. Your mum had a flight out the next morning. They were on their way down a narrow road, the one that leads from the gate where they’d parked and walked up the hill to picnic and take in the view. The top was down on his car and she had a scarf around her hair. I imagine they were happy. Anyway, it was then, right there around the bend”—it was clear she had a vivid picture of the geography—“at that crossroads where they would have turned left to head home, that a lorry came barreling down that hill and lost control.”

They called it a runaway, because it was out of control.

The front of the lorry was taller than the top of Martin’s convertible—the car small and the couple inside even smaller.

Mrs. Garrens took a deep breath.

Eleanor wasn’t breathing. “They’d gone back to the place where they made me?”

Mrs. Garrens’ eyes were complicated with feeling. “Yes.”

“And it killed them,” Eleanor said.

“You mustn’t think of it that way,” she said, quiet and firm. “It was an accident.”

It killed them, Eleanor thought. The wrong love or the right love gone wrong, it killed them. “But why didn’t they stop? Why did they keep seeing each other?”

“They didn’t. I don’t think they did. That last visit . . . it happened as it did . . .” Mrs. Garrens didn’t have an explanation.

As much as Eleanor wanted to screech,
They kept seeing each other,
like a teenage girl in a warranted rage,
They wrote letters and visited each other. She let him see me and didn’t let me see him. She never told me about him. I don’t know how many places she went to be away from us and be with him
, she didn’t say anything.

“Excuse me a moment.” Mrs. Garrens tucked her hair into place as she left the room and went up the staircase.

Eleanor poured herself a cup of cold tea and added some milk, then she got up to leave. She was stepping into her boots in the hall when Mrs. Garrens came back down the stairs. “I wanted to give these to you. I tried to find some ribbon and collect them. They’re pictures. They’re for you.”

She handed Eleanor a box wrapped in flowered paper tied with a bit of twine.

“Thank you.”

“We won’t say good-bye.”

“No,” Eleanor agreed.

“Let this settle. Come back and I’ll make you a meal. We’ll have a meal together.” They pressed their cheeks against each other, first one side, then the other.

E
leanor had pulled off the A170 and was looking for the posted gas station when her cell phone rang. In searching for it, she reached under the passenger seat and
scratched her arm on a piece of metal. Finally she answered, exasperated.

“Yes.”

“It’s me. Hey, I was wondering about you.”

“I’m on my way”—Eleanor slowed the car and pulled over, parked on a grassy patch on the side of the narrow road—“back.”

“That’s good. I’ve missed you.”

She didn’t say anything.

“Did it go well?”

“Not so well.”

“Disappointing. Are you all right?”

“I don’t want to . . .”

“Okay.” There was a touch of gentle awe in his tone and nothing was said for moments. “But you’re on your way back here.”

“I don’t know where else I’d go.” Her words were clipped and her heart knew it wasn’t fair. Still, she had nothing to spare.

“You’re not all right.”

“I’m not, no.” Hard and dry was what she felt inside.

“You made it to Scarborough, though.” He waited, but she didn’t answer. “Eleanor, let me come get you. Can you stay where you are?”

“You don’t have a car.” An inhale and exhale to try to change her mood.

“I’ll take Granley’s car.”

“Mead, no. I’m fine. I just pulled off to fill the tank, and I’m starting out now, on my way back there. I’m almost back, and I’m fine to drive, really.”

“It’s pummeling rain, are you sure you’re safe?”

“It’s not raining here.”

“There should be a phone connection the whole way back, if you want to talk. Almost all the way, until you’re almost here, we could keep talking.”

“I don’t want to talk now. It shouldn’t be long, from where I am.”

“You sound odd.”

“Don’t worry.”

“And you don’t want to talk?”

“I don’t, not now, not later, really.”

“But you’re on your way.”

“I am.” She didn’t say good-bye when she turned off the phone.

Later, on a small road, she redialed him. “How is it I sound odd?” Having him at the end of the line began to melt the iciness in her belly and around her heart.

“I dunno. Lonely, angry.”

“Are you packing to leave?”

“I’m not. I’m waiting for you.”

She smiled. “Where would you go if you were packing up to go somewhere?”

“I’d take you to Patagonia.”

“Seriously?”

“Not terribly.”

“Ah.”

A close-knit family of sheep stood in the road and she slowed to a stop.

“There are sheep in the road,” she said.

“In Patagonia?”

“No, there are sheep in the road and they’re not moving.” She swerved a bit to the right and stopped.

“Honk and keep honking till they budge.”

“I don’t want to. I’d rather wait for them to go. Where are you?”

“I’m at Fiddleheads. Having a lager here and reading the news.”

“Can I meet you there? I’d rather not go straight to the house.”

“Get back on the main road when you can. It’ll get you here faster. The back roads might take you a couple of days, if you don’t lose your way. Call me when you’re almost here, if you need directions to the pub.”

“There’s a man coming now,” she said. “Through the bushes, where the sheep came from. He’s got a dog with him and they’re moving now. I’ll find the highway and see you soon, okay?”

“Yes, it’s great.”

She didn’t hang up and neither did he. “You know, you’re a fine lass, an astonishing fine lady.” She listened.
“Whatever’s spinning you about, nothing in the world will change that, ever.”

The depth of her anger surprised her, as she drove through the rain that had started to pound so hard she could barely see through the windshield, and was all tangled up with knowing she would never know what it was her mother had chosen, much less why.

Mrs. Garrens was a lovable kind of grandmother. Yet more family, in this world of families she had found, after living so long without family. Eleanor Sutton Garrens Abbott. No orphan should have so many names. Something had been explained. There was some way in which a mystery was solved, but she experienced this one, this secret that had shrouded her life, as a taint. There was something dangerous in what she’d uncovered and though facing truth seemed, all in all, a good thing, she felt jangled and desolate and raw.

She called Mead again and he directed her along the road to the pub at Fiddleheads. As she passed through Flatfields, the rain stopped, and a distinct double rainbow arced from one side of the valley to the other. It should have been a good sign, but it seemed like a mockery.