The inn was near the Chatsworth estate and I took the train from Oxford to Chesterfield, where Bethan met me at the station in her mother’s Mercedes, a late-model silver sedan, which surprised me because she had mentioned money problems and the difficulties they had keeping the inn profitable despite the near constant flow of drinkers. Apparently they had not managed to tap the lucrative market of ramblers and backpackers who seemed to favor establishments with more character than the Cock & Boot. It was on the edge of a village, overlooking that gentle, managed landscape of hills and woodland, but with an interior which spoke more of the 1980s than the 1780s, lacking those qualities sought by tourists, the air of olde worlde Englande that Americans in particular so desire, many of them assuming, as I once did, that the whole country will look like a Merchant Ivory film or a Jane Austen adaptation.
When I met them Bethan’s parents were the age I am now, in their early fifties. I have little sense how she described me before my arrival, perhaps as the rather sad American colleague who was alone for the holidays and knew no one else well enough in the whole of Britain to have another invitation. They welcomed me with what I would later come to recognize as a Northern working-class friendliness, rough at the edges but quite genuine, without ever plumbing very deep beneath the surface. They asked me few questions about myself and I only gradually discovered, or inferred, that people like Bethan’s parents tend not to probe in the way Americans almost certainly will, trying to place a person socially, geographically, and professionally within minutes of being introduced. So they appeared little interested in me at first, except as a friend of their daughter, who drove me out to a neighboring village where we had dinner alone the first night, in a pub with a disused well in the middle of the dining room, its opening capped with Perspex, a light burning forty feet below, and a little plaque on the wall next to it claiming it was haunted by the soul of a Fenian fugitive drowned there by locals in the late nineteenth century.
I had brought Bethan a late Christmas present, a book on Paul Klee, in whose work she had expressed interest, with a card that read, ‘For Bethan, who is not ignored, Love, Jeremy.’ She had complained on the phone of feeling her parents were so convulsed by the drama of their dying relationship that they seemed unaware of her presence. When I presented the book she blushed and became flustered and later insisted on buying me dinner. I understood I had made a misstep. We were not at the gift-giving stage of our friendship, although in America, I was certain, this would not have been so. The expectations were different, and I had no sense of their parameters.
That night, the first night I spent at the Cock & Boot, was also the first of two nights I spent getting drunk with Bethan and her mother, Peggy. We started in the pub itself, rather warily circling Bethan’s father, Tom, a small solid man, not much more than five-foot-five but with muscular arms and a chest of the kind that made me think he might once have been a boxer and could certainly still throw a punch if he had to eject someone from his pub. When I tried to pay, he raised a hand and grumbled, refusing my money.
I spent the night in one of their guest rooms (again, they refused payment), and while I thought Bethan might come to visit me after her parents had gone to bed, I spent the night alone. The following day I came down for breakfast at eight but there was no one about. I was starving and walked into the village hoping to find something to eat but nothing was open. I didn’t know if this was because it was New Year’s Eve or simply the reality of life in a small English village but I returned to the Cock & Boot to find Tom readying the pub for opening. I had a stabbing headache and was nearly doubled over with hunger when he looked up in my direction.
‘Can I get you some breakfast?’ he mumbled.
‘That would be great, Tom. Whatever you have.’
Without replying he ducked into the kitchen and a few minutes later returned with a plate of fried eggs, sausages, baked beans, a grilled tomato, and toast, which he served to me at the bar.
‘That looks delicious,’ I lied. The plate was a sea of grease.
‘I always do the breakfasts. The Missus can’t cook to save her life.’
As I began to eat Tom polished glasses behind the bar, his jowls hanging, bulldoggish, checking from time to time on my progress but for the most part preoccupying himself with what looked like busy work.
‘You like my daughter?’ he asked at one point, his back to me.
‘She’s very nice.’
‘She’s a good girl. Any man would be lucky.’
‘She’s an intelligent woman.’
Tom glanced over his shoulder, mouth breaking into a smirk as he cracked his neck, put down a glass, then cracked his knuckles before reaching out to turn a bottle of whisky ten degrees to the right so the label was aligned with all the others on the shelf.
‘Told me to be nice to you. I hope you’re, you know, nice to her.’
I was unsure what he might be implying. It was the kind of oblique statement that fell short of asking what my intentions might be, but was close enough to make me more uncomfortable than I already felt.
‘I appreciate your concern, but we’re only just getting to know each other.’
‘Says you have a wife.’
‘That’s right.’
‘And a daughter.’
‘Also right.’
‘Love her I bet.’
‘Very much,’ I said.
‘So you understand.’
He said the words so quietly they sounded like a threat.
‘Yes, I do understand.’
He was silent then, as though thinking, though he did not give the impression of being thoughtful. Ruminative, perhaps — it was possible he was the kind of man who turned a single thought over in his head until it accumulated mass enough to burst from his mouth. ‘O’Keefe. That Irish?’
‘Long way back.’
‘My older brother was killed in the Birmingham bombings.’
‘I’m sorry. Bethan never mentioned it.’
‘Happened before she was born. IRA.’
‘That must have been very upsetting.’
‘Was only a boy,’ he said, as if this made the loss of his brother even more profound, as if the Irish, in killing his brother when Tom was only a child, had amplified the wound. ‘1974. Drinking in the Mulberry Bush.’ His eyes popped and he stared at me, face reddening.
‘I imagine that’s the kind of thing you never really get over.’
There was another long pause. The fat congealed on my plate.
‘Your daughter in New York?’
‘She is.’
‘Must miss her.’
‘Very much.’
‘Couldn’t have left myself. If I were you, I mean. That’s all I’m saying.’
His words poked a finger into the most sensitive part of me, where the guilt was raw.
‘I accepted the job at Oxford before the attacks, and I was already separated from my wife.’
Smoking was then still legal in English pubs and Tom pulled a pack of cigarettes from his pocket and lit one, blowing smoke towards the ceiling. When I had eaten all I could, I pushed the plate across the bar, wiped my mouth on the paper napkin, and left the room.
What kind of man was I to leave my young daughter in New York and move to Oxford at the very moment of the city’s worst crisis in its history? Though Susan and Meredith were comparatively unaffected, their lives being almost wholly on the Upper West Side with no reason to venture much farther south than 59th Street, every time I was made to think about my choice I felt queasy with guilt. At the time of the attacks I had already been out of the city for more than two months and was preparing for my transatlantic move from the upstate safety of my mother’s house. Even there, knowing I would have to leave America in only ten days, I was paralyzed by panic. When my mother and I woke in the middle of the night to the keening of sirens we were convinced that terrorists had found their way to our corner of the state, and in the first months in Oxford I could not hear a siren without my blood pressure rising. No one had bothered to warn me about Bonfire Night and Guy Fawkes’, the weeks of fireworks at the end of October and beginning of November, fireworks that sounded more like explosions than acts of celebration, so that as I tried to go to sleep in my narrow twin bed in College I would suddenly sit upright, often banging my head against the frame, when what sounded like a mortar shell exploded somewhere nearby.