The Gazebo: A Novel (8 page)

Each day while he worked, Claire took a sketch pad and wandered the grounds until she found the one thing she’d decided to draw, in hopes of turning the sketch into a sculpture sometime: an old horse drinking water from a trough. Every afternoon she came back to this same spot and sketched until the tin of charcoal she had bought in Italy had been reduced to pieces as tiny as little pebbles, Claire’s fingertips now black.

She would need to find some more charcoal somewhere; maybe the man at the front desk would know where she could buy some. Claire stood and began to walk back toward the castle. The day was utterly silent, and as the path she was walking on broke out into the main open field, she looked up and saw a person
walking way ahead in the distance. It was Martin. At first Claire was surprised that he wasn’t in the kitchen, but then, as she looked at him, she became more than surprised. She was worried. There was something about the way he was walking—his shoulders hunched, his head down—that was very uncharacteristic. It was as though he had been pacing the field. Claire lifted a hand to wave to him, but he seemed not to see.

By the time she got back to the castle, he was sitting on the edge of their bed. The look in his eyes when he finally raised his face toward Claire was something she’d never seen there before. “Are you okay?” she asked, the question pointless, because she already knew the answer.

He paused for a long moment, before he spoke. “I have bad news,” he finally said. “I’ll make it simple. The money is gone.”

“Oh,” Claire said. She slid next to him on the edge of the bed before she even had a chance to try to understand what he was saying. “What do you mean?” she asked him. “I don’t understand.”

“That’s it. It’s gone. My inheritance. All of it.”

She heard him this time, but his words still seemed to be taking a while to get to her, as if they were arriving from a great distance. He was explaining to her that now that he was twenty–one he thought he’d surprise her, that he had walked into Cong, the town on the other side of the property line, and stopped at a bank and tried to have the money from his inheritance wired there. When he was done talking, he fell silent, miserably. Claire reached for his hand and took it in hers. “But this is impossible,” she said. “That’s your money.”

“With my father,” Martin reminded her, “nothing is impossible.”

“But I don’t understand. It
is
your money, isn’t it?”

“Yes, it is. Was.”

“So he can’t do that,” she said.

“Claire, he
did
it. He took it back.”

“But that’s impossible—” Claire started to say again, but Martin cut her off. “Would you please stop saying `it’s impossible, it’s impossible,’ because it’s not. It’s obviously not impossible, because it just happened.”

It was the first time Martin had raised his voice to Claire, ever. And they both understood
at once that it was no coincidence it had come within moments of discovering that their entire future had changed. The touch of their hands suddenly seemed too much, and wordlessly they allowed them to slide apart.

“All right,” Claire said, softly. “Not impossible, then. Illegal.”

“And immoral, too,” Martin answered, just as softly, “but I don’t think my father cares about either of those concerns.”

“But isn’t there something you can do?” she asked. She had grown up thinking that there was always something that
could be
done. If a friend made you unhappy, you spent less time with that friend. If you were untalented at arithmetic, you studied harder before the next test. It was a naive attitude, she saw now, and she was embarrassed. The world of Ash Rayfiel, its finances and father–son antagonism, was beyond her frame of reference.

“Probably,” Martin said. “I could sue him, I guess. Report him to the police. Nothing I
would
do.”

“So what
will
you do?”

“Nothing.”

Claire crossed her legs, folded her hands on
her lap. “Is that best?” she asked, her voice sounding prim, like her mother’s.

“It’s wisest, I think.”

“You’ve thought this through already,” Claire said.

“On the walk back from Cong. A slow walk.”

“I saw you. I waved.”

“Did you? I’m sorry. I didn’t notice. That must have been when I was looking at the lake. I was thinking what it would be like never to see it again.”

They each had something they needed to do then. Martin had raised his voice, and now it was up to him to take Claire’s hand back, or at least to make the effort. For her part, Claire knew that Martin could never say what he really thought about the money—the loss of the money—not unless she said it first.

Martin reached for Claire’s hand, and Claire reached back and said to him in a quiet voice, “You know, the money doesn’t matter.”

Claire waited, then she stood and paced across the beautiful room to the window. Lough Corrib was out there, a lake by a castle in Ireland, a lake she and Martin had slept
over, that she had sketched, that—Martin was right—neither of them might ever see again. Could it really be starting so soon, when they were still only twenty–one years old: a litany of good–byes to favorite places?

“No more expensive boutiques,” she heard Martin saying behind her. “No more going somewhere on a whim. No more apple–green Chanel suits.”

“I never needed any of that,” Claire answered. “And by the way, the ridiculous suit was your idea. You insisted.”

“I know,” he said. “But how can you go back to the life you had before without resenting me a little bit for it? Not for losing the money. But for showing you what money could do.”

“My mother used to have a name for it when I’d start feeling sorry for myself,” Claire said. “She’d say, `Poor Me is here again. Who invited her over, Claire? Was it you? Go home, Poor Me, go home.’”

“Well, we won’t be poor, anyway,” Martin said. “We’ll just be …
normal
. People with jobs, and rent to pay.”

“I think, in a strange way, it might be better
this way,” said Claire. “Otherwise, don’t you think we’d become spoiled—sort of horrible? And some part of ourselves would always wonder, Did we do that? Was that us? Did I open that restaurant? Did I make that sculpture and sell it to that gallery? Or was it really just the money all along?”

“So now we’ll know,” Martin said.

“Now,” Claire echoed, “we’ll know.”

In its own way, the grounds of Thetford Castle and the nearby community of Cong were as much a small town as Longwood Falls, and maybe even smaller. News traveled fast, and there were no secrets. By the time Martin appeared at the reception desk that evening and asked to speak to the manager, he knew from the muted response and averted eyes of the usually talkative staff that word was out: the American couple were going broke and would have to make an early departure. Martin quietly settled his account, and the following morning, as he was carrying their bags out the front door to the car waiting to take them back to Galway, Duncan Lear approached him, already dressed in his chef’s whites for another
day in that big, overheated kitchen.

“Sorry,” he said to Martin. “Heard you’d be leaving us. Let me give you a hand with that.” He took a bag from Martin and carried it out the door. After the two men had loaded the bags in the back of the car, Duncan pulled Martin aside, onto the lawn behind the fountain where a stone mermaid stood. Nobody could possibly overhear them here, but Duncan still glanced around nervously.

“I haven’t made this public,” Duncan said, “so obviously it’s just between us. But I’m giving notice next week. I’ve gotten an offer to work in a restaurant in London. Fellow I know opened it earlier this year, and it hasn’t quite hit its stride yet. It’s in a very desirable neighborhood. Kensington. You know the area?”

Martin nodded. He had stayed at a hotel in Kensington with his parents and nanny, many years earlier. There was a book, too, a sequel to
Peter Pan
called
Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens
, which Martin had read after that trip. The area was beautiful, the gardens lush and sprawling.

“Would you like to come work for me there? I’ve got to put together a staff rather quickly.
I hope you’re not offended at the notion,” Duncan continued quickly. “It’s just that we heard your news, and I wanted to be of some help.” He paused. “You’ve got a real talent,” he said. “I think you might have a future in cooking. If that’s what you want. Although,” he added, “you might want to brush up on your knife skills a little.”

So while they had thought they would be leaving the castle with a feeling of loss and aimlessness, Claire and Martin ended up leaving with something much different: an offer. The money wouldn’t be much, Duncan had warned, but he could provide Claire and Martin with the use of a small flat above the restaurant, at a very reasonable rent in an otherwise unreasonably expensive neighborhood.

Martin and Claire spent a few nights in a cheap student hostel in London, and then Martin started his job the following week, as soon as Duncan arrived in the city. The restaurant, known only by its address, 17 Dobson Mews, was small and pretty, and its kitchen offered steel counters, rows of burners on the stoves, and, though food rationing was still in effect in England, a supply of very interesting ingredients.

That first day in the restaurant, Martin worked and worked, helping Duncan set up, and at night, he and Claire went to bed in their new flat upstairs. The rooms were furnished, though not particularly nicely. There was a nondescript living room with a brown nubby sofa and chairs, and a small no–frills bathroom. The only piece of furniture they liked was the curved black teak sleigh bed. But the one true luxury of the flat was the large back room, which was flooded with light. Claire could use it as a studio, Martin suggested as they lay in bed. “At least for now,” he added. “When we have children, I’m afraid you’ll have to turn the room over to them.”

“Children,” she said. “We’re not even married.”

He turned to her in the sleigh bed, which creaked slightly beneath them. It seemed that this bed might lift off the ground and take them somewhere, anywhere; it seemed to have magical properties. No, Martin corrected himself, it was their
life
that had these properties. He was enormously fortunate in having Claire, and the kind of work he loved, in a city that they hadn’t yet explored. But best of all,
they were finally settling down. It was starting: the part where they didn’t need to keep checking train schedules or signing hotel registers or waking up in the night and wondering where they were. The part where they stayed in one place, and where they turned it into their own, so that after a while they developed an attachment to it, a need to be here.

“I think,” he said carefully, “that we ought to think about getting married then, don’t you?”

Both of them were always thinking about marriage, of course, but they had been on the move constantly, living in various unfamiliar places, and it wouldn’t have seemed natural. But now here they were, Martin settling into his dream job, Claire beginning sculpture classes at the Tate with a wonderful, idiosyncratic teacher, the two of them starting from scratch in an appealing flat. They would get married within the next few weeks, they decided.

When they broached the subject with Duncan, he insisted they hold the ceremony at the restaurant. “Invite anyone you like,” the chef said, magnanimously.

“But we don’t know anyone in London,” said Claire.

“Well,” Duncan said, “invite me.”

That night, after the end of another long day, Claire turned to Martin and said, “Oh, my God.”

“What is it?” he asked.

“I just realized,” she said. “Our children are going to have British accents.”

Claire wasn’t used to the sound of the buzzer on the front door of the flat. Because they still had very few friends here, almost no one ever pressed the green metal bell beside the door frame. Once, a man had come by delivering eggs to the restaurant and had rung the wrong buzzer, but that was it. So when the buzzer rang one morning, after Claire and Martin had been living their newly settled life upstairs at 17 Dobson Mews for two weeks, Claire jumped. She had been sitting and making a sketch for a sculpture she wanted to do in her class at the Tate that afternoon. The sound was sharp, unfriendly: a long, demanding bleat.

She opened the door. A Western Union messenger was standing on the top step, speaking
her name and handing forward an envelope. The telegram read:

She felt something twist slightly inside her, and a sudden panic threatened to overtake her. She had barely been thinking about her mother and father, and now look what had happened. Since she had been in Europe, she’d dutifully written home with addresses where she could be reached in an emergency, though she’d never given it any real thought. But now she understood she had reached the day that anyone choosing to live abroad for any period remotely resembling forever sooner or later must face. She would have to go to the States tomorrow; they had very little money, but would need to scrape enough together to cover her airfare. Slowly, Claire went downstairs to the restaurant. Martin was sitting with three other men at a table in the back, snapping green beans.

“The wedding. We’ll have to wait a little while,” she said to him, after she’d shown him the telegram.

“That’s not important,” he said.

“Of course it is.”

“I’m just so sorry to hear this, Claire,” he said. “I should come with you. I mean, I should be with you.”

“No, you should be here,” she answered. “They need you here. And if
I
need you, I’ll send for you. I swear.”

“Claire—”

“It’s very sweet of you to want to come with me, Martin,” she said, “and I really do appreciate it. But I’ll be back really soon. My God—my whole life is here. You’re here. Our future children and their little accents are here.
I’m
here.” She touched the starched chest of Martin’s white apron. “I’m
here
,” she repeated.

Claire left London on a wet autumn morning. Moments after takeoff, clouds erased her entire view of the city she had just been getting to know, and Claire found herself studying instead the droplets collecting on the outside of the window, drifting slowly in the wrong direction, seemingly defying gravity. Rain falling
up
: it was something she’d never seen before, something she couldn’t have predicted, precisely the kind of thing, she suspected,
that would be waiting for her in the house on Badger Street. Several times she’d tried to imagine what she might find there, but she’d come up empty. Completely blank. And the telegram was no help. Her sister’s choice of the word
very
, in particular: how ill was very ill? The possibilities were endless, and therefore each fantasy about it was meaningless, and when Claire tried to imagine life in Longwood Falls she saw nothing. All she could picture now with any certainty was what she’d left behind in London. Claire leaned her forehead against the oval of the airplane window, stared into the fog, and thought, Go home, Poor Me, go home.