Canarino

‘What about Elizabeth?’ he asked, yawning, running his hands through his hair.

Leon idled the bike lower, quietening it. ‘What do you mean?’

‘I always felt like a shit that I stole Elizabeth from you,’ David said. ‘When you guys were going out. You remember—you introduced me to Elizabeth?’

‘You didn’t steal Elizabeth from me, man! She was a gift. I gave her to you!’ Leon backed the bike away from the curb, turning the front wheel into the road. ‘I thought you’d be perfect together.’

It started to rain, just a few big heavy drops at first, then suddenly, with a swishing susurrus, a downpour.

‘I’ll call you,’ Leon shouted, revving the bike. And he was gone.

CHAPTER 2 (#ulink_c131ed7d-14f5-5ff6-b7bf-4b32b3681151)

Elizabeth Ruel was the only child of a US Army general. She had been moving around all her life, and she was expert at planning and executing departures and arrivals. With virtually unlimited financial resources and with a full-time private secretary to barrage the airline, the moving and storage company, and the newly hired American staff by phone, fax, and e-mail throughout April, May and early June, she was able to preserve an atmosphere of total serenity on the day she traveled with her children from London to Rixeyville,Virginia. The only things Elizabeth could neither predict nor control were the weather and the behavior of the children, but she had learned over the years of flying transatlantically for summer vacations, for Christmas shopping, for medical appointments, for parties, to prepare herself mentally for the general types of intemperateness she might expect from the skies and from her offspring. Elizabeth sometimes told her children that serenity came from within; more precisely, she pictured it as a blanket which she could take out and lay over them. She really did not need to take a tranquilizer, and neither did they. The first-class cabin was big enough and empty enough to preclude anything jarring from another passenger. Toward delay, restlessness, boredom, Elizabeth cultivated an attitude of courteous passivity. On this journey, as in life, she had reduced the number of possible unexpected events to a minimum; there was no point in hurry, worry, anxiety, or bother of any kind.

When she arrived at Dulles airport with Gordon, Hope, and their nanny, who was called Norma, there were two cars waiting, a silver Mercedes and a dark green Land-Rover. The farm manager, Mr Richards, had already been instructed by fax to take Norma and the luggage in the Land-Rover. But first Norma belted Gordon and Hope into the back seat of the Mercedes. Nobody spoke; there was nothing that needed to be decided or even discussed. Hope stirred as she was transferred from her stroller like wounded personnel from a stretcher, then quickly settled to sleep again, her neck collapsing at a crickmaking angle, her hair rubbed to a rat’s nest by the long hours on the itchy airplane seat. Gordon, a dazed marine, upright and obedient in his exhaustion, stubbed his foot against the wheel of Hope’s stroller, tripped and fell against the open car door, and crushed Norma inside as she bent over Hope in the back seat.

Elizabeth chuckled, placid, concertedly unruffled, and pulled the door open again, taking Gordon by the hand. ‘Let’s go around to the other side,’ she said in an instructing tone of voice, and then very softly, ‘Tell Norma you’re sorry.’

He mouthed it blankly. ‘Sorry, Norma.’

Norma reached down and rubbed the dents across the backs of her stalwart, black-stockinged calves, but she didn’t stand up or take her head out of the car and she didn’t say anything.

Slowly, sedately, Elizabeth and Gordon walked around the back of the Mercedes. Gordon was carrying a stuffed bear. The bear’s legs were tucked inside Gordon’s bent forearm like the ends of a Roman toga and the bear’s top half was reaching over toward the ground, the arms stretched downward like an acrobat in midhandspring. Gordon’s navy-blue shorts and his underpants were sticking to his thighs and bottom with sweat; he took his other hand from his mother’s and reached down to tug his clothes away from his skin, missing a step. Elizabeth lifted her upper lip disapprovingly; almost imperceptibly she shook her head. But two lessons at once were too many, she decided. She forebore to correct her son further and only smoothed his white shirt across the back of his shoulders.

The flounced hem on Elizabeth’s flowered chiffon skirt fluttered around her finely sculpted knees as a hot wind blew across the tar-smelling, black parking lot. The skirt was creased in the back all the way up to the center vent of her cream linen jacket. Otherwise she was ready for the diplomatic press corps. She watched Gordon climb onto the seat still holding his bear, then she leaned down and gave him a kiss on the cheek. She didn’t touch his seatbelt.

‘Wait for Norma,’ she said, just above a whisper; then with a lonely air returned around the car to where the chauffeur, his eyes respectfully glued to her low-heeled, open-backed, cream suede shoes, was holding the passenger door open for her.

Elizabeth always spoke in an undertone, as if guarding her privacy from eavesdroppers. Her voice was soft and wan, with the faintest hint of a southern drawl, and it had a plaintive quality, as of a lady in distress or someone very tired. In moments of excitement or uncertainty, she dropped the volume even lower; she found this commanded the best of people’s attention.

She made no sound at all as she slipped into the car. The seat was burning hot underneath her thighs and she sat up with a silent jolt of pain, lifting her knees to get the flesh clear of the upholstery and flexing her toes onto their very tips to keep her legs high. She turned her head back and said without emotion to Norma, ‘Please check the seat; it might be hot. Do they need something to sit on?’

Norma put the flat of her big, red-mottled hand on the leather between the children, feeling it. ‘It’s fine, Mrs Judd,’ she said in her brusque, indefinably rural English accent. She looked at Gordon. ‘This one’s not complaining.’

The chauffeur circled the car, pressing the doors closed with a firm, subdued click, then got in and started the engine, leaning forward as he did so to conceal the steering column and ignition with a kind of demure, round-shouldered posture that seemed to apologize for the need to exercise his professional capacities in front of Elizabeth and her children.

‘Wait for them,’ Elizabeth said, hardly moving her lips. She watched Norma hoisting herself into the Land-Rover. The brown uniform travels well, she was thinking, but I’ll have to get her out of those thick black tights or she’ll die in this weather.

The drive took over two hours. The afternoon heat shimmered above the rushing, tire-whitened highway and above the sprawling scars of unrelenting development. Strip malls, office parks, condos sat exposed, treeless and shrubless, on the dusty green verges and raw red earth.

Elizabeth couldn’t bear the view. She looked straight ahead.

Out of the corner of one eye, she thought she saw the Land-Rover overtaking them in the outside lane. She turned her head and glanced past the chauffeur. Norma leaned forward in the front seat, grinning and waving as the Land-Rover shot past, windows flashing in the sun.

Elizabeth raised her eyebrows. She tilted her head across the center console, glancing at the speedometer: nearly seventy.

‘How do I get Mr Richards?’ she asked blandly.

The chauffeur’s eyes flickered toward her; he took his foot off the gas, letting the car lose speed.

‘The cell phone’s at your elbow, ma’am. Just press the green phone twice. I called him just before you arrived.’

She could see the Land-Rover moving away in the left lane; then as the phone began to ring against her ear, it pulled back into the center lane a few cars in front of them.

‘Hello?’ Mr Richards’s deep Virginian voice sounded distant, impatient.

‘Mr Richards,’ she began with caressing sweetness, ‘I’m sure you don’t usually talk on the phone when you’re driving?’

She heard him curse. The car directly in front of the Mercedes suddenly braked, and the chauffeur slammed his brakes on, too; the Mercedes grabbed and jumped.

Then Norma’s voice came on. ‘Everything all right, Mrs Judd?’

‘Yes, thank you. Norma, why doesn’t Mr Richards drop into the right lane, wait for the chauffeur to pass, and fall in behind the Mercedes? Then he can just take it easy.’

‘Yes, Mrs Judd.’ Norma sounded downcast.

Elizabeth added in a solicitous voice, ‘Don’t bother reminding him that the speed limit on this road is fifty-five. Just tell him how special it is for the children to see everything first.’

Almost instantly, the Land-Rover appeared in the right lane, slipping backwards beside the Mercedes.

Elizabeth didn’t check whether it pulled in behind them as they passed. She knew she could depend on Norma.

The chauffeur fiddled with the air-conditioning control and asked in a cautious voice, ‘Are you cool enough, ma’am?’

‘Oh, yes,’ she answered faintly, ‘don’t worry about me at all.’

Otherwise, there was silence. On they crawled, at the speed of respect, dead slow in the far right lane now, dirgeless, joyless, tasteful, serene. Gordon gradually slumped down in his seat and dozed off like Hope.

After the highway, the road rolled and curved through the humid green woods. Everywhere the high trees were drowning in honeysuckle vines,Virginia creeper, and poison ivy. From time to time a vista opened, then flashed closed as they passed fields, barbed-wire fences, pink-flowered spreading vetch; later, post-and-board fences, rampant, lumpy grass meadows, horses grazing. At last they slowed, along the pasture adjoining the farm lane, and turned in at the big, dark green post-and-board gates through the empty fields straight toward the haze-shrouded mountains.

Elizabeth swiveled in her seat, reaching back to pat the children’s legs, coming suddenly to life.

‘Wake up now, Gordon. Wake up, Hope. We’re here, darlings. You’ve had a little rest, and now it’s time to wake up. Do you want to see the farm? Look, we’re passing the pond. There are the ducks. Do you see them?’ She roused them lovingly and mildly, stroking their bare skin, which was icy with air-conditioning.

The driveway mounted and fell away over the small swelling hills; it was graveled in smooth gray stones and the grass alongside was rich and green, mown short, with about three feet clear to the double rows of dark green fences on either side. There were pairs of sapling oaks in full tender leaf every forty feet or so, each with its own enclosure of fence to keep away deer. Elizabeth surveyed it all with satisfaction. She had asked for the trees and the new fences the day she saw the farm. The gravel had been discussed later. The manicure was professional, she thought to herself. At least Mr Richards knows what he’s doing with stationary property.

At the fork in the drive, they turned away from the mountains and through an enormous pair of decorative wrought-iron gates set in a tall laurel hedge. On the other side of the hedge, the white-columned portico of the house rose up two stories in front of them. Spotty fieldstone walls climbed three stories to the peaked eaves above, and spread away in two wings on either side.

Again she tugged on the children’s legs as the car came to a stop. ‘Wake up, you two!’ she whispered urgently. She thought they would be excited to see it. She couldn’t help being a little excited herself. She had bought the place in the dead of winter, gone around it for a few days with the interior decorator, and since then worked from plans and photographs.

She had been remodeling and decorating the house inside her head for six months. It represented a new, chosen, phase in her life. It was nothing to do with men, with giving or receiving. It was her own vision, executed unstintingly.

Nothing in the house belonged to her personally, but everything—every painting, every chair, every light fixture, every doorknob—represented a choice she herself had made and which, taken all together, embodied and revealed her mature sensibility in finest detail. Decoration was one medium in which Elizabeth felt entirely at ease, entirely confident. It was an expensive medium, but she had no reason to hold back. She hadn’t asked David a single question about this house. She hadn’t asked him how much she could spend on it or what he might like. She had decided by herself how he would live and what would make him comfortable. Up until recently she had made such decisions with David’s face before her or with the phrase, What would David think…hovering somewhere in the back of her mind. She had for years divided herself in two, and the stronger part, the outspoken part, had been given over to David’s interests, David’s needs, David. That period of her life was finished. Now she was free to express herself, her neglected, buried self.

It was only a house, only a piece of land; she knew that’s what most people would say. I would even have said it myself at one time, Elizabeth thought. But the years had taught her the power of physical beauty, the danger, the pleasure. Beauty was stable in a house, in an object. It could be worshipped there safely by anyone. Elizabeth felt that her personal beauty had been, unexpectedly, such a burden and had brought her mostly pain; as long as her beauty lasted, she would never be able to stop using it. She knew perfectly well that she was addicted to it, to the worship her beauty brought her. But she felt this as a weakness. Beauty had weakened her because it had given her a false power, false leverage. Either people were afraid of it, or they grew used to it, familiar, and the power faded.

Elizabeth herself was a long way off fading, but she wasn’t anxious about that. It was hardly possible for her to take personal pleasure in her looks anymore. It had been years since she had earned any money by them, and she had never been entirely comfortable selling her looks anyway; however good at it, however successful she had been, she always felt that there was something wrong about it, something wanton—at least if you actually needed the money, as she once had. And there were people she would not have shown herself to, if it hadn’t been for the money. Part of her could never get far enough away from her public life, from those people, and from the sense that she had flaunted something private without realizing it, that she had given her maidenhood away to what she had later come to think of as a mob, a mob she feared and yet also held in contempt because it made of her looks what it liked, what it wanted for itself, without having any real understanding of her, Elizabeth, at all. You could use personal beauty, she had decided, but you couldn’t really control it; you couldn’t give it a particular meaning, a particular content.