The Canterbury Sisters (3 page)

What I’m thrown into, of course, are sites devoted to literature and history. Articles about Chaucer and Becket and Canterbury’s reputation for miracles. I sit back in annoyance as the scholarly articles roll by and while I’m waiting, my eye falls on a copy of my alumni magazine, which has languished for God knows how long on my desk. In the back they always list guided tours and I’ve noticed them before, in a passing sort of way. I’ve always thought it would be nice to have a professor lead your group through museums, battlefields, and palaces. To have someone there to point out the important things. It’s easy to imagine how these trips would be appealing for lonely single women, those sad souls who have reached middle age with enough money to travel but no one to travel with.

I scan the catalog by the glowing blue light of the computer screen and soon enough, there it is: the name of an art professor who escorts both groups and individuals through southern England. She looks like just what I need—pale, serious, academic, disinclined to asking personal questions. I send her a quick email, telling her I need to walk the Canterbury Trail ASAP, top to bottom, from London to the steps of the Cathedral. And then I google how to transport ashes on an international flight.

Evidently the dead are a sizable segment of the travel industry, because the answer pops right up. The urn must be carried onto the plane, not packed in a suitcase. It must be scanned and taken through security and I will need a note from the crematorium confirming that the contents are human remains and not something like plutonium. I must be prepared for the fact that security can open the urn at any time if they wish, that small bits of my mother might fly out onto the airport carpet or dirty the hands of a TSA agent. Or perhaps I might choose to eschew the urn altogether, the site suggests, with a gentle but pointed hint. Transfer the ashes to something less heavy and likely to trigger the scanning machine. Like, for example, a ziplock bag.

I always meant to take my mother to Europe, but my travel was so often for business or I was meeting Ned in some romantic place. And of course she was busy too, fostering misunderstood pit bulls, walking for Amnesty International, framing houses with Habitat . . . Then she got sick. We let all our chances pass, Diana and I, and now at last she’s coming with me, but she’s coming in my carry-on bag. I put the wine down, thinking that it’s bitter, but I know I’m being unfair. I’ve been drinking while thinking of something else, which is the cardinal sin of wine tasting, for everyone knows how easily emotions can trickle from the mind to the tongue. Has the wine gone bitter, or have I?

The sun is up. I rise and leave my desk, the juice glass still in my hand. I pour the remains of the Syrah into the kitchen sink and look down at the dark-red stain. In my email I told the professor that I could be in London as early as Sunday and I would like a private tour. It probably costs a fortune to hire a personal guide, but all I can think is that I need to be gone, long gone, before Ned calls to apologize and explain again about how he just couldn’t help himself, how no man can resist a woman in need. The desire to escape feels huge within me. In fact, if I don’t get out of here right now, I’m not sure what will happen.

I pick up my phone and try again. “Siri,” I say. “What’s the meaning of life?”

A pause and then the answer:
I Kant answer that. Ha ha.

Ha ha. She’s quite the hoot, that Siri.

Two

T
hey did a study once on why so many people cry in airplanes—whether it’s the silence, the isolation, or perhaps just some primordial fear of leaving terra firma.

I think it’s because airplanes are the closest most of us come to enforced meditation. On the runway, in that small, trembling world between here and there, we have nothing to do but sit with our thoughts. Of course, once the plane is airborne, there are a thousand things to preoccupy us—movies, Kindles, games, puzzles, drinks, that slim but seductive possibility that our seatmate could turn out to be our soul mate. But during takeoff and landing, we’re on our own. We cannot avoid the vast lonely prairies that exist inside our own heads.

At first, it seems luck is with me on the flight. No one is sitting in the aisle seat, so I’m able to stretch out and sleep. We land early; so early, in fact, that Heathrow doesn’t have an empty gate ready for us. While we wait for an opening, I pull out my phone and check my messages. Most of them are predictable—work and ads and notifications from Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter. But one of them is from the college professor I’ve hired as my guide, and the subject line reads
Slight change of plans.

Slight change of plans? That’s not good. In my experience, there’s no such thing.

I look out the airplane window at the rain-washed tarmac, a tremor of anxiety working its way up my spine. Even the brief time I spent researching this trip on my computer taught me that walking the Canterbury Trail isn’t nearly as easy as it sounds. It’s more a matter of walking what’s left of the Canterbury Trail. The original pilgrim route followed an even more ancient Roman path, but now this old and holy road has been broken by the demands of modern life. The trail is slashed in several places by a major highway and the pieces left intact weave largely across private land, through farms and orchards and even the backyards of rural homes. Since the trail belongs to the National Trust, the owners of the land knew they must cede the route when they bought the property. Presumably they are used to Americans with backpacks and blisters and broken hearts stomping past them in the mist. But Google warns that following the path is tricky. The markers are few and subtly placed, making it nearly impossible to tell where the trail breaks off and takes up again.

Bottom line, you need a guide.

But it would seem I’ve already managed to lose mine. She is emailing me from a gurney in a hospital ward, where she lies awaiting an emergency appendectomy.

“Can you believe it?”
she writes.

No, I can’t believe it. No one has an appendectomy anymore. She may as well be telling me she’s succumbed to bubonic plague. But then, in suspiciously complete and grammatical prose for a woman who is allegedly in the grip of agony, she offers me a solution. One of her fellow teachers at the university, by luck, is leading an organized tour to Canterbury that will be departing London this very afternoon. A classics professor, highly regarded in her field, quite young, almost a prodigy. And she assures me that I needn’t worry that I am crashing someone’s party. The women in the group come from all over America and have booked their trip through an outfit called Broads Abroad, which caters to the solo female traveler.

The solo female traveler. I guess that’s what I am now.

“It’s the perfect solution,” the professor writes, but I’m not convinced. I don’t want to talk while I walk. I don’t want to bond with other women, to tell them my troubles, which, while agonizing, are also—let’s face it—pretty clichéd. And once I’ve been forced to tell them my stories, politeness demands I must listen to theirs and I bet they all have dead mothers and bad boyfriends too. My phone has adjusted to the local time, which is not quite seven a.m. I gaze out into the ugly foreign morning and consider my options.

Maybe I should just take the train to Canterbury. Dump Mom and get the hell back to Heathrow, and with any luck I could be on a return flight to Philly tonight. It wouldn’t be a true pilgrimage, not in the step-by-step sense, but it would fulfill my promise. And that’s what this is about, isn’t it? Putting the period at the end of a sentence. Hitting
TAB
and starting a new paragraph in my life. Saying goodbye. Ridding myself of ghosts. There is absolutely no reason to make things harder than they have to be.

The plane at last begins to move toward an open gate. I look down at the message in my hand.

The Broads Abroad. Jesus. The name doesn’t sound promising.

BY THE time I take the Heathrow Express into the city, the rain has stopped and the morning has turned pink and gold. Oil-slick puddles shimmer like Monets on the sidewalks and the air feels fresh. I emerge from Paddington Station and head in the direction that my phone assures me is dead east, the autumn leaves crunching beneath my boots as I walk.
London moves at a different pace than
American cities
, I think, stopping on a street corner to change hands on my suitcase. The bustle is more muted. The tempo more civilized and humane. I don’t like it.

How long has it been since I’ve eaten? Too long to remember, which isn’t good, so I dip into the nearest café. Order the “standard” without thinking and am greeted with the eternally confounding British breakfast of baked beans, mushrooms, and tomatoes. But I realize I’m hungry once I smell it, perhaps truly hungry for the first time in days. As I work my way through the plate of food, I read the email from the professor once again, this time in a calmer state of mind.

The Broads Abroad are meeting at the George Inn for luncheon,
she writes.
It’s near the site of the Tabard Inn where Chaucer and his pilgrims began their journey five hundred years ago, but the Tabard burned somewhere along the way in some sort of brothel fire. The George is of the same ilk and era and thus a suitable spot to inaugurate a pilgrimage.
Those are the precise words she uses—“ilk,” “era,” “inaugurate” and “pilgrimage”—and I wonder again that a woman on the brink of surgery would take the time to write such a wordy and persuasive note. It is a British trait, evidently, this chipperness in the face of adversity, this compulsion to wax about medieval history while bent double in pain.

Take the tube to London Bridge Station,
she advises,
and you’ll find the George no more than a ten-minute walk away.
I eat my beans and look at a map I grabbed on the train. It’s a considerable distance from Paddington to London Bridge, but then again I have hours to kill and after being cooped up on the plane, a long walk might do me good. I don’t intend to actually join the group, of course. At least not without a little reconnaissance. She says there are eight women on the tour, counting the guide, and a party of that size should be easy to spot. I decide I will observe them from a suitable distance and try to gauge how annoying they are before I make my decision. If they seem okay, I will approach them. If not, I can catch the train from London Bridge to Canterbury and scatter my mother alone.

ACCORDING TO Wikipedia, Chaucer’s pilgrims began their journey in Southwark, then a sketchy part of London. Southwark was outside the city limits, the medieval equivalent of a suburb, and thus beyond the reach of the law. The district was filled with prostitutes, thieves, and drunkards.

Now it’s full of tourists. The entire London Bridge area, in fact, is a hub of amusements designed for foreigners on holiday. The bridge itself, as well as the dungeon and the tower and several full-size reproductions of sailing ships, which are moored and bobbing on the Thames. People are even walking the streets in costume, handing out flyers for museums and tour buses, and I am barely within Southwark when I’m accosted by a man dressed like Sir Walter Raleigh. I know he’s Raleigh because he makes a grand gesture—steps back and bows, taking off his shabby red velvet cloak as if he might lay it across one of the rather sizable puddles that have formed on the street. I guess the idea is for me to walk over the cloak like the original Queen Elizabeth, but I shake my head to show him this isn’t necessary. To show him that, despite the fact I’m wearing a backpack and dragging a suitcase, I’m not your typical American tourist. No matter how gallant he pretends to be, I will not follow him back to the dock and pay ten pounds to tour his boat. He’s got the wrong sort of fool entirely. To emphasize my independence and busyness, I step directly into the puddle.

He smiles.

“Fare thee well, milady,” he says, his voice rising a bit on the last syllable, as if it were a question.

Is he mocking me? Is “Fare thee well” Elizabethan for “Fuck you”? I’ve always suspected that British men consider themselves wildly attractive to American women, and let’s face it: they have a point. They know we love them for their accents . . . that a British man can be pimply, broke, and rude, and yet an American woman will fawn over him, favor him without question over one of her own countrymen. But what is a woman supposed to say in response to “Fare thee well”? Is it “Fare thee well as well,” which doesn’t make a lot of sense, or is it more proper to say “Thank you” or “I’m fine”?

I look back over my shoulder as I walk away. Sir Walter Raleigh is already unclasping his cape for another tourist. Someone more appreciative, more feminine and helpless and lovable. She is giggling and her friends are taking a picture as she steps, one tentative foot hovering in midair above the moth-eaten red velvet. He bows before her, his plumed hat in one hand, her fingertips in the other. She is smiling in a way that suggests she will give him ten pounds. Smiling as if she would gladly give him anything he asked for.

Even with the long walk, I get there early, nearly an hour before the women are due. The George Inn is not quite what I envisioned. Dark, yes, with red trim on the windows and copper pots, all that sort of inn-ish nonsense. But it’s larger and more upscale than I would have guessed and crowded, apparently with locals as well as tourists. I take a seat at the long oak bar and order my first drink. My state of mind is probably best illustrated by the fact that I think of it precisely like that. As “my first drink.”

RESTAURANTS ARE the churches of my generation. These are the places where we congregate to confess our sins, drink wine, search for glimmers of hope, and most important, find community . . . or at least a momentary sanctuary from our loneliness.

And if the George Inn truly were a church, this bar would be its shrine. I gaze up at the rows and rows of brightly colored bottles, all carefully lit from behind, as if they are jewels on display in a museum. Or maybe books on a library shelf. No, not quite. Not books. Because books contain stories of things that have already happened and the liquor bottles on these high shelves before me hold stories of what is yet to be. Lovers who have not met, swords still in their sheaths, journeys that may or may not be undertaken
. And this goblet
, I think, looking deeply into the one in my hand . . .
something unexpected waits for me in the bottom of the glass. Some story will begin when I take my last sip.