The View from Here (2 page)

But then, unexpectedly, there we were, hand in hand on that big bed in the honey-lit Italian hotel room, husband and wife again, a new tie binding us. A new challenge had been added to the bonds that living together and sleeping together and losing people and crying and raising a child together had already wrought. And I decided that it would be possible to banish this other woman, an outsider, a trespasser, both from my mind and from our lives, and to start over.

It was very easy during the soft days that followed to settle on this resolution. They were so pleasant. Full of wine and long lunches and meandering walks along pastel alleyways to the lakeside, all designed not to tax me. We went on ferry rides, Phillip winding my new scarf—the color of the lake beneath—carefully around my neck. A gauzy tenderness descended between us, blunting the edges of our talk and turning our lovemaking gossamer. I believed us to be in one of those fresh-start phases that characterizes long marriages, the links a little delicate, but the purpose shared.

I thought that way until, arriving back in England, I queued to buy tissues in the airport and, turning from the kiosk, saw Phillip speaking on the telephone. He was at one of a quartet of those curved plastic booths that shield only the upper half of the body. He was leaning against the molded exterior and I could see his face. What was it about him, about his manner, that warned me, even across the acres of strangers and hospital-lit serviceable surfaces? His eyes were dipped, almost closed, and his expression was intense, urgent even, utterly engrossed. Suddenly, sensing my gaze perhaps, he lifted his head and hung up, and then he roved his eyes, scanning for mine. On catching them, he sent me a cheerful, childish wave that I felt myself hate him for and he lumbered toward me, battling with the luggage trolley. Then we left together, he leading the way to the taxi stand.

That night we stayed in a hotel in London and ate supper in our room at one of those tables that waiters wheel in and prop up and dress with white linen and vases of candy-colored blooms and foliage that do not belong. As we began Phillip said, “The books are doing very well,” and smiled, as if he were awarding me some sort of prize. He has always smiled like that.

Phillip is an attractive man, but his looks are quiet—long legs and a sprinkle of gray at the temples—so the smile takes you by surprise because there is so much self-confidence in it. Just then, aware of its attractiveness and the effect that that surprising smile could have, even on me, even after all these years, I felt a bit sick. All the more sick because I wanted to ask, and yet desperately did not want to, whether this news about the books was based on some fresh information gleaned during a hushed and passionately vital telephone call to his editor. That's who Josee was, is—Phillip's editor. Well, Phillip's and Tom Creel's.

Phillip and Tom are partners in a small, but very successful, advertising agency—Creel & Grace. There are two other partners now, but their names only feature on the letterhead. Phillip and Tom, on the back of some ideas that were boozily sketched out over a long Sunday lunch at the Creels' house at which I was present along with Tom's wife, Alice, have written two books about marketing together. The reviewer for the
Times' Weekend Supplement
called these books the “rare sort that change the way you think” and a lot of other people said similar things. Phillip and Tom have been on the radio and on the television and are quoted now in all sorts of places. They have had their photographs in the papers.

Josee has one of those photographs in a frame on the bookcase behind her desk. I saw it there when, joining Phillip for lunch once, I met him at his publisher. I have wondered since whether it was already happening then. Whether they stood in the same room as me, a pair, smiling. Knowing.

“So I thought I might do another one,” Phillip went on, “only without Tom. I've spoken to him and he agrees. In fact, it would work out well because then he'd be in the office while I was at home.” Another smile was awarded here. “What I mean is that I could stay at home for the next few months, with you.”

I had too many conflicting thoughts to reply straightaway. Phillip lifted his soup spoon again from the side plate where he had rested it while he spoke and held it in midair for a moment, waiting.

“In case you needed me,” he explained, unnecessarily.

Phillip and Tom had, for several years now, shared a two-bedroom, two-bathroom flat at the less expensive end of one of the more expensive areas of London. Alice and I never went there, preferring to stay in hotels, or with friends, when we were in town. We spoke of “the flat” as if it were “the dorm”; it had that sort of association for us, studenty. But Phillip and Tom each spent about three nights a week there, more or less happily, not making the journey in from home on the other days, their seniority having afforded them this luxury, and a bevy of keen young assistants. Reflecting on this arrangement I thought, surprisingly for the first time, that Phillip might have confided in Tom about Josee. If he had, would Tom have told Alice? The idea appalled me. The humiliation. Strange, isn't it, the sense of shame that someone else's misdeeds can engender?

But now here was Phillip suggesting that he should give that up, the weekly trip to London, to the office. To his lover. He would be with me all the time, and even if I'd miss the small freedoms that I had come to enjoy in his absences—the mistimed meals, the unstructured days, the long evening conversations with friends—I took this suggestion as a sign that I might have misread the airport telephone call, that the well of warm feeling that had been refilled during the past few days had not been poisoned after all.

“I'd like that,” I said as the waiter reappeared at the door. He had forgotten our water.

The next morning we met Chloe at the station. It was Friday, and she had taken the day off work so as to spend a long weekend with us. It was her third trip home since my news, which is what people called it—
I was so sorry to hear your news—
and she had spoken to me every day. She greeted us on the busy concourse with a young person's shout and flagrant affection. Chloe is twenty-five years old and very pretty. She looks just like her mother.

“Let's see,” I said, peering at her feet.

She twisted a slim leg toward me to show off a new kneelength black boot and said, “Maggie gave them to me,” a little shyly, as if this gift were illicit rather than something naturally passed between blood-tied people, between a woman and her daughter.

She still feels, I think, a need to protect me, not from Maggie in particular, but from her relationship with her. She wants to stress that I am “mother.” It is what she introduces me as. She calls me “Ma” these days, while reserving an unadorned “Maggie” for the woman who gave birth to her. I need her reassurance much less than she thinks, but I appreciate her efforts anyway. And, it's true, I was once much thinner-skinned on the subject. The day when Chloe was ten, when Maggie made contact again for the first time, the first time since she had disappeared just after Chloe's first birthday, is still vivid for me.

Looking at Chloe then, especially tall in her new boots, I thought about all the anxiety that call of Maggie's had engendered, and the much-negotiated, much-monitored eventual reunion. It had all come to this, all that turmoil, mellowed to so much casual conversation on a railway platform.

“How is she?” I asked

“Oh, she's fine. She sent a book for you.”

It would be a book about healing, about the cyclical nature of things and the danger of burying emotions, a book about the mind's effect on illness. I didn't need a book to learn about things like that.

I smiled and looped my arm through Chloe's, and at the announcement of our train, we walked together, trailing Phillip, luggage-laden again, down the platform to our carriage. Chloe's overnight bag was threatening to topple from its perch on top of our two larger, matching suitcases, and Phillip had to stretch his hand awkwardly to prevent the fall. He jerked his head to indicate where our seats were, and Chloe and I sat and compared magazines while he attended to the unloading. What a happy family we must have looked. A seamless happy family.

The weekend was like so many weekends before it. We fell quickly into the easy patterns of our history together, even in the shadows of those thunderclouds, even with my fresh hospital admission looming. Chloe lay about and looked lovely and leaned on things and picked at food and tossed her hair and talked. About her friends, about her job, about her boyfriend, Ed, about the decorating she was planning for her flat. Phillip and I, from old habit, caught conspiratorial eyes over her head, united as always by our adoration for her. Things like that don't change so readily.

I was feeling well and considered the fact that I had never really felt ill. I felt no more ill knowing that the tentacles of something sinister lurked in the deep recesses of my abdomen than I had before I had known it, and that other concern, that anxiety that had set the fear really clanging, was beginning to seem less real too. If Phillip was willing to give up his London time and stay at home with me, then perhaps after all I had exaggerated the thing in my own mind. I knew that I did not believe this, but I also knew that I needed to accept it to some extent, to convince myself of it, in order to avoid the damage that dwelling on the possibilities would do. I was just managing to haul myself up onto this high, level plain of reasonableness when Phillip made the announcement that sent me scrabbling for a foothold again.

Chloe was stretched on the sofa, half reading, half sleeping, absently stroking Hobo, who is rather a cross old cat these days, though he still succumbs to her charms.

“Weren't you going to see Emma?” I asked her.

She looked over at me and rolled her eyes and grinned. “Don't worry,” she said, drawling a little for affect, “I won't miss my train.”

I laughed, because that was exactly what I was worried about. Chloe always leaves things until the last minute and, as it was, she was planning on taking the late train after she'd been up to the village to catch up with Emma. Chloe and Emma were at school together, and Brownies, and swimming club, and ballet. It was that kind of friendship. The kind that dims and flares again all through life.

“Put your things in your bag at least, and put the bag by the door. That way I'll feel more secure,” I said

“You needn't display so much unseemly desire to be rid of me.”

She got up though, dislodging Hobo, who looked displeased, but soon managed to settle himself smoothly into the warm spot she had vacated with that absolute indolence that only cats can manage. Crossing to my chair, she bent and kissed me.

“People get fired,” I told her, “even little hotshot magazine writer cookies like you. They get fired, they starve, they end up on the streets, they turn to crime. I worry.”

“She worries,” Phillip said, joining the game. We all knew our parts.

“Oh, I'll do fine on the streets,” Chloe cooed, twisting herself into a cartoon hooker's swivel.

Her father hit her rump with a roll of Sunday newspaper.

“I'll take the train to London with you,” he said. Then he offered to make tea with no change of tone.

I don't know why I had assumed that his permanence in the house would be immediate. He had never said so much, though it had been implied, I was sure, that he would stick with me now, until we knew that I was entirely well again. I still thought that way then, that I would be entirely well again. In fact, I had begun to think that the illness, like the other thing, was some sort of aberration, a brief, nasty interlude, soon to be swept away by a cleansing wave of normality. But I wanted Phillip with me in the meantime. Phillip's physical presence was part of the confirmation of this.

When he came back with the tea, pulling a footstool toward my chair to put mine on, I said, “I had in my mind that you would be here this week.”

He sat, balancing his own cup at chest height.

“There are a few loose ends, sweet. I need to get everything tidied up at the office, make sure Carla can cope and Tom's up to speed on everything. That way I'll be able to manage things from here from now on.”

I nodded because, on the face of it, this was perfectly sensible. There was no logical reason why the acid should have begun creeping in my stomach.

“Anyway,” he went on, putting his cup on the floor at his side, leaning back, casual now, “you're seeing Sonia tomorrow. I'm sure she'd stay”—his tone softened then—“if you don't want to be on your own. It's only two nights, though,” he added. “I'll be back on Tuesday.”

I reassured him, I would be fine. Sonia would certainly stay if I asked her and perhaps I would, but there were things I wanted to get done before next week, the hospital week, so a day or two to myself would be useful.

Chloe had gone off by then, to get her jacket and comb her hair I suppose, and Phillip and I slipped effortlessly into the kind of conversation—about packing, and train times, and what's for supper—that people have in marriages. I cannot remember a word of it, though only a few months separate me from that afternoon and now, and yet I do recall, with sunlit clarity, every detail of every moment that I spent with another man twenty-three years ago.

• • •

It was Richard Luke who collected me that long-ago Sunday after Maria's party in a big navy Buick with ivory leather seats. He patted the dashboard affectionately. Good cars, he told me, Buicks. His father had sworn by them.

The car cruised along smoothly till the buildings began to thin out and huddle together. There was a rubbish dump at the edge of town, a gaudy tangle of trash, bordered at the back by a billboard advertising cigarettes. Children, boys mostly, played on the road nearby—improvised games with stones and cans. Richard slowed and gave the horn a mild slap with the flat of his hand. A woman, scavenging, looked up briefly and the children scattered then chased after the car, laughing and shouting, as we pulled off again. Richard glanced in the rearview mirror. He had two boys of his own, he said. He gave me a look that implied he knew an awful lot about boys.