Several hours later and Beth has gone into Christmas overdrive. We have eight different cheeses, a huge ham, chipolatas, crackers-edible and the ones you pull-a turkey I struggle to carry to the car, and a cake that cost a ridiculous amount of money. We cram it all into the trunk, go back for glittering baubles, strings of beads, gold paint, glass icicles, little straw angels with dresses of white muslin. There’s a farm two minutes from the manor selling Christmas trees-we call in on the way back, arrange to have a tree four meters high delivered and erected on December the twenty-third.
“It can go in the hallway-they can wire it to the banister,” Beth says decisively.
Perhaps I should not let her spend when she is troubled, like now. I daren’t put all the receipts together, add it all up. But Beth has money-money from Maxwell, money from her translating work. More money than I have, certainly, but it’s something we never discuss. She lives small, most of the time. She squirrels it away unless Eddie needs something. All mine is absorbed by London, in getting to work, in rent, in living. Now we have enough food for ten people, when we will be five; but Beth looks happier, her face is less drawn. Retail therapy. But that’s not it-she likes to be able to give. I leave her threading garlands along the mantelpiece, with a slight frown of concentration while I put the kettle on, feeling pleased and sleepy.
There’s a message from my agency on my mobile phone, about some supply work at a school in Ealing, starting on January the twelfth. My thumb hovers over the redial button, but I am strangely reluctant to press it, to have real life intrude upon me. But money must be earned, I suppose; life must resume. Literature must be crammed between deaf ears. Unless it doesn’t. Unless I live here, of course. No more rent. Just the upkeep, although that would probably cost more than my rent does now. Would it be worth it for five years, even ten? Trying to live here-just long enough for the legacy to stand. Then we could sell up, retire at the age of forty, once property prices are back up. But if living here makes Beth ill? And if I will always have this feeling of something stealing up behind me? I wish I could turn and look at it, I wish I could make it out. I remember everything else that happened that summer, except what happened to Henry.
We came here the two summers after that year, and our mother watched us closely. Not to protect us, not to keep us from harm; but to assess, to see how we would react. I don’t know if I was different. A little quieter, perhaps. And we stayed in the garden; we didn’t want to venture further any more. Mum kept us away from Meredith, who was unpredictable by then; who flew into storms of cursing and accusation. But Beth drew further and further into herself. Our mother saw and she told our father, and he frowned. And we stopped coming.
Outside, the sun sets orange and coldly pink on the horizon. I spray the holly gold, the paint burnishing the dark leaves. It looks delicious. The fumes make me dizzy, euphoric. I am hanging it from the banisters and laying it along window sills when Beth comes downstairs, arms folded, face creased with sleep. She moves from place to place where I have hung it, touching it lightly, testing the paint with her fingertips.
“Do you approve?” I ask her, smiling. I’ve tuned the radio to Classic FM. They’re playing “Good King Wenceslas.” Beth nods, yawns. I sing: “Silly bugger, he fell out; on a red hot cinder!” I’ve no kind of singing voice.
“You’re chirpy,” Beth tells me. She comes over to the window sill I am strewing with sprigs, puts my hair behind my ear for me, touches the scratch under my eye. So rare, her touches. I smile.
“Well…” I say. The words teeter in my mouth. I am so tempted to say them, still so unsure if they’re right or wrong.
“Well, what?”
“Well, Dinny’s here,” I tell her.
Loving
1902
The journey from New York to Woodward in Oklahoma Territory was a long one, covering a distance of nearly two thousand miles. State after state rolled out beneath the train, ever westwards. At first, Caroline was awed by the scene beyond the window. As they left behind the familiar towns of New York State, settlements became fewer and further between. They passed through woods so thick and dark that they seemed to belong to another age, closing the train in for mile after countless mile. They passed through fields of wheat and corn no less vast, no less astonishing; and towns that grew smaller and smaller, as if compressed by the wide expanses of land all around them. Beside the tracks in one station, rough dwellings had been built and children were playing, running alongside the train, waving, begging for pennies. With a start, Caroline saw that their feet were bare. She waved to them as the train eased away again, and turned to look back as their fragile homes shrank into miniature, and the land yawned away on either side. It was truly untamed, she thought, this land to the west. Men lived upon it, but they had not yet shaped it; not in the way they had shaped New York City. Caroline sat back in her seat and studied the distant purple hills with a pull of unease, feeling the once mighty train to be a mere speck, an insect crawling across the endless surface of the world.
By the time Caroline changed trains for the third and final time, at Dodge City in Kansas, she was heavy with fatigue and stale in her clothes. Her stomach felt hot and empty because the picnic Sara packed for her had run out a day and a half ago; Sara, who could not conceive of a journey so long that a half-dozen hard-boiled eggs, an apple and a pork pie would not be provisions enough. Caroline joined fellow passengers for lunch at El Vacquero, the Harvey Hotel beside the tracks in Dodge City. It was a brand new, brick building, and Caroline took this as proof of the new wealth and stability of what had recently been frontier land. She looked around discreetly, too curious about her surroundings to resist.
The unmade street outside thronged with people and ponies and buggies and wagons, making a muted noise quite unlike that of a New York street. Saddle horses were lined up along the hitch racks, resting their rumps on one tipped-back hoof. The reek of slurry was strong, drifting over the town from the nearby stock pens, and it mixed oddly with food smells and the hot bodies of people and animals. Confused, Caroline’s stomach did not know whether to rumble or recoil. Men sauntered by with pistols strapped to their hips, their shirts untied at the throat, and Caroline stared at them in amazement, as if they had walked straight out of legend. Her heart beat hard with nervous energy and her throat was dry. For one instant, she almost missed Bathilda’s indomitable presence at her side; missed having the barricade of her respectability to hide behind. Ashamed, she straightened her shoulders and reread the menu card.
The restaurant was busy with the lunch crowd, but a crisp girl in a neat uniform soon served her; bringing out consommé with vermicelli, and poached eggs, and coffee.
“Are you travelling far, miss?” a man asked her. He was sitting two seats away along the table, and he smiled and leaned toward her, so that she colored, shocked to be spoken to so casually. The man was unshaven and his coat cuffs were shiny.
“To Woodward,” she said, unsure whether she should introduce herself before speaking, or indeed if she should speak to him at all.