The Colonel's Daughter (19 page)

‘What can I say?' she said. ‘That's what Florida does.'

‘You look great, Mon,' said George.

‘Thanks, George. Well, it's great to see you, isn't it, Brewer? And on your first day. You just wait till you've been here a week. You'll never want to go home.'

‘So Brewer says,' said George.

‘What's it to be?' asked Brewer, opening a polished drinks cabinet, ‘bloody marys, whisky sours . . .?'

‘Heavens,' said Beryl, ‘we don't normally drink this early, do we George?'

‘That's the whole point of it, Beryl,' said Brewer, ‘to start doing what you don't usually do. We've learned that, haven't we, Monica? Only then will you get in tune with Florida life.'

‘I'll have my usual,' said Monica.

‘Oh, what's your usual?' asked Beryl.

‘Make one for Beryl, Brewer,' said Monica, ‘then she'll see.'

Every room and compartment on
Nadar III
appeared to have been designed to accommodate what George had heard was called Cocktail Hour. Little veneered glass holders were clamped to chair arms, recessed into walls, bolted even to the lavatory tiles. You could not move on
Nadar
without finding a convenient place to set down your drink. Noting this, George thought, being rich is the art of forethought. I am too random a person, despite my ability with figures, to predict accurately where I or my guests might want to set down their cocktails. Everything on this boat is in precisely the right place with regard to its function, but I have none of the skills I recognise in this kind of planning. He stared up at Weissmann's seat of power, wondered what it would be like to stare at it almost every day, as Brewer did, and to know that all one possessed emanated from there, from a German art dealer who was fond of bankers. He looked at Brewer, expertly shaking and mixing cocktails. He's grown fat, he thought suddenly, to protect himself. But then George berated himself for this idiotic tendency he'd failed to leave behind in England – his tendency to analyse and question and seek the comfort of certainties. It impedes, he thought, my positive response to whatever happens, and the only important thing, here, is to enjoy myself.

*

River Kingdom, a flat-roofed, blue-painted building with its own substantial mooring, was, George decided, rather like a fish theatre. Models of lobsters and crayfish and crabs and blue-fin sharks busked up the walls and across the ceiling, netting hung down in carefully arranged loops, tanks of living eels were spotlit, menus were like programmes: Act One, shrimp-crab-mussel-prawn-clam-oyster, Act Two, brill-striped bass-eel-mullet-lobster-shark fin and so on through a dramatis personae of water meat George had never in his life encountered. Waitresses in usherette black brought unasked-for salads as an overture to the meal. Outside the sun went in, as if the house lights had suddenly been turned down.

George was seated between Weissmann and Monica. Daren sat between his father and Brewer, which left the two women next to each other. But Weissmann, who had arranged the seating, had deliberately placed Beryl and Monica in seats where he wouldn't have to talk to them. Duty called on him to tolerate his captain and his friend as lunch guests, but not their wives. The elaborate courtesies he reserved for the women of his own elite weren't available for the likes of Beryl: patronage went only so far.

Beryl and Monica talked about England and Suffolk in particular and Woodbridge and Wakelin All Saints. At one moment, George heard Monica say, ‘I've forgotten to ask him, I suppose George is manager by now?' and cast an anxious look at Beryl, who seemed defeated both by her gigantic shark steak and by the question. He looked away.

‘So,' said Weissmann, turning an indifferent eye upon George, ‘you like America.'

This was neither question nor statement, but something in between. George looked at Brewer, who was grinning encouragingly, then coughed.

‘It's our first time,' he said. ‘We flew from Gatwick yesterday. I'm quite surprised by everything I've seen.'

‘Surprised? In what way surprised?'

‘Oh, I don't know,' said George, ‘it's very hard to pinpoint precisely where the differences occur. Everything seems unlike England in a way I can't yet explain. I thought it might just be a question of size and climate, but it isn't.'

‘Well,' said Weissmann, portentously, ‘this is the United States.'

‘Right, Sir!' said Brewer. ‘I've been saying to George, now that he's here, he'll never want to go back. We haven't. We've never had a moment's regret.'

‘You like Europe?' asked Weissmann, blackly. And George felt an irritating panic rise in him. Europe. The images conjured by Weissmann's use of the word, the images to which he was expected to respond, were all, all as alien to George as words like quatrocento and surréaliste and schadenfreude and Auschwitz. Weissmann, American, Jew,
knew
‘Europe'; George, Englishman and part of Europe, did not.

‘I'm fond of the country,' said George, taking up the wine one of the usherettes had poured for him.

‘Which country?' said Weissmann.

‘The countryside,' stammered George, ‘the countryside of England.'

‘But Brewer said you were a banker.'

‘Yes. I am. I'm with Mercantile and General.'

‘In the City, no?'

‘What, London? Oh no, I'm not in London.'

‘So you're not a real banker, then.'

George was saved from having to comment on his own reality by the nagging of Choots who, with the underwater world spread out for his delectation, had ordered cold roast beef and pickles.

‘This isn't nice, Daddy,' said Choots.

‘No?' said Weissmann.

‘No.'

‘Why did you choose it, then?'

‘I didn't choose it. Brewer chose it for me.'

Brewer smiled. ‘It's what he asked for, Sir.'

‘Don't eat it,' Weissmann said, ‘give it to Brewer.'

Choots went off to the serve-yourself sweet table and helped himself to a wedge of chocolate gateau. Brewer good-naturedly crammed the thick slices of red beef onto his lobster plateau and proceeded to eat both simultaneously.

Weissmann smiled.

‘He's a good man, Brewer, your friend,' he said to George, ‘he does what I ask, eh Brewer?'

‘Yes, Sir!'

‘I spoil my son, you are thinking. In Europe, children are not spoiled. I was not spoiled. I was kicked and bullied. Now, I'm the one with the boots, you see? But not for my son. He will have what he wants because I am too old to be a good father and this is punishment enough. So you're not really a banker?'

George found Weissmann's twists and turns of thought vexing; he invited you to enter a conversation, then left you no room to participate in it.

‘I've been in banking all my life,' said George quietly.

‘You know money?'

This was like the Europe question. It reverberated cavernously with meaning inaccessible to the likes of George. He sighed. This was the first sigh he had heard himself breathe since landing at Miami airport. To his own astonishment, he heard himself say angrily, ‘I know, Mr Weissmann, what this holiday is costing me.'

*

Monica's special cocktail hadn't agreed with Beryl's stomach. Back at Palmetto, she was lying in the large bed (lying, she realised, rather stiff and straight so as not to rumple the sheets an unseen maid had so carefully smoothed) feeling pale and drowsy. George, perched by the Man Copulating With Hoop, stared anxiously at his wife.

‘Why don't you go off and have a game of golf, George?' Beryl suggested.

George smiled. ‘I can't play with myself, Beryl.'

Beryl placed her two hands comfortingly on her stomach and tried to breathe deeply. A novice at the Wakelin All Saints Yoga for Beginners, she had learned that pain can be relieved by mind control allied to correct breathing.

‘I'm terribly sorry, George. I don't know whether it was the shark or Monica's cocktail, or just simply me. I didn't take to that Weissmann, did you?'

‘Just rest, Beryl.'

‘I'm alright to talk. I wouldn't want to be Brewer, would you?'

‘He's changed.'

‘I wouldn't want to be at the beck and call of a spoilt person like that.'

‘Brewer doesn't seem to mind. And anyway, we don't know him, Beryl. I expect art connoisseurs are a difficult lot.'

‘Do go and play golf, dear. I'm sure you'll find someone to give you a game.'

George got up and crossed to the bed. ‘Going to have a bit of a sleep, then, are you?'

‘I think I will.'

‘Good boat, wasn't it? Imagine owning that.'

‘Too powerful for me. Too built up.'

‘Built up?'

‘Well, it was just one deck put on top of another, put on top of another, wasn't it? No line.'

George looked fondly at Beryl. There were moments – not very many – when his abiding sense of his wife as a humdrum woman suddenly parted like the Red Sea and another (sensitive, sharp-witted) Beryl came striding through. This was one such moment.

‘Rest, love,' he said gently, and touched her forehead with his finger, as if offering her a benediction.

Beryl closed her eyes and seemed, in that instant, asleep. George tiptoed out of the room and quietly closed the door. He walked to the balcony window of the sitting room and stared longingly at the golf course. Above it, behind the palms, the sky was flat and grey – a peculiarly English sky – and the wind was blowing hard. The sun hadn't been seen after they'd sat down to lunch at River Kingdom, and the journey home through choppy water had been disagreeable. Weissmann had left the boat with only a nod to George and Beryl, saying anxiously to Brewer, ‘There may be a storm. Make sure the mooring is very safe.'

George had no sense of any impending storm, but the golf course was clearly deserted. Palmetto people only played golf in the sunshine. Or else they knew that a storm was coming, they read signs that George was unable to decipher, bought their evening griddle steaks and drew their heavy curtains.

It was warm in the room. George opened the sliding balcony window. The parasol had been closed and only the fringe moved slightly with the wind. George sat down at the table and rubbed his eyes. Too much has happened, he thought, in the space of time I had reserved only for an arrival. The extraordinary early morning joy, the girl with her damp breasts and her disdain, the ride in the Cadillac, the boat trip, lunch, Choots, tiny glimpses into worlds and lives he would never know; he was left with a feeling of stifling confusion. ‘I need time,' he said aloud, ‘I need more time.'

He began to soothe himself with the comfort of the coming days and weeks. Hot, quiet days spent with Beryl on the golf course, lunches at the pool, shopping for gifts for Jennifer in the famous shopping malls, a day trip to Miami beach . . .

George sat back, folded his arms. He was tired, he now recognised. The time change had suddenly hit him. He closed his eyes, heard the wind fill his head. Why had no one mentioned the presence of the wind? Then, on the edge of sleep, he heard his own voice announce with sudden and absolute certainty: ‘They're gone.' His eyes snapped open. He stared down, tracing each concrete foot of the balcony on which he sat. He felt nauseous, drained. He ran a moist hand through his thick hair. ‘They're gone.'

He got up. The maid had moved them, had she? She had put them back in the louvered cupboard or propped them up by the door? He crossed the sitting room, entered the kitchen. They weren't by the door, they weren't in the kitchen. He was sweating now, drenched in sweat. He would have to wake Beryl or risk waking her by opening the wardrobes. He opened the bedroom door quietly. Beryl was asleep, nose gasping at the ceiling. George moved stealthily to the cupboards, pulled them wide open, gazed at his lightweight clothes, Beryl's cotton dresses, their mingled pile of new shoes, recognising that what he was feeling was fear, a drenching of fear such as he couldn't remember since, as a timid boy, the secret mouldering apple store in his toy cupboard had been crushed to pulp by his mother's suicidal rage, dinky cars and lead soldiers, cigarette cards and painted matchboxes lying ruined and stained in brown rot.

‘Beryl . . .' he said tightly.

Beryl moved but slept on, snoring gravely.

‘Beryl . . .' George heard the choke in his voice and knew it for a suppressed scream. ‘Someone has stolen my golf clubs.'

Beryl didn't move, but opened a bleary eye and looked at her husband. ‘George,' she said, alarmed, ‘are you crying?'

*

The black security guard shifted his massive frame on the high backed chair and turned towards the chain-locked side door of his booth on which George had tremblingly knocked.

‘Come round to the window!' yelled the guard. He touched his gun with a wide finger, let a signal for dangerous and immediate action ripple through his chest and arms. George's rowan head appeared at the booth glass.

‘Can I see your pass, Sir?'

George fumbled for his wallet, into which he had carefully put his pass and Beryl's.

‘I've come to report a theft . . .' began George.

‘Security pass, please,' snapped the guard.

George laid the pass on the little counter, wanted to comment that the guard had seen him not one hour ago as Brewer drove them home in the Cadillac, but refrained from saying this and waited patiently while the guard examined his (by now familiar, surely?) photograph inside its piece of transparent plastic.