Solsbury Hill Page 19

  “It’s true, it would have been closed yesterday, but you had a chance to see it. I’m glad.” Mrs. Garrens looked like a parrot the way she moved her head, the tightness in her mouth like a beak, the gaudy clothes she was wearing. “I think it’s good you’re here,” she said to Eleanor. “I think it’s a good sign.”

  It sounded like a bad sign.

  “I’m sorry I called so late last night. I didn’t realize. I came here looking for Martin Garrens, but I don’t know him, didn’t know how to find . . . I looked in the phone book. There were seven or eight, actually.”

  “Oh, my.” Mrs. Garrens tugged at the string of pearls around her neck. “I thought maybe Alice had said something.”

  “Alice, no, she didn’t say anything. Then you know Alice . . . Are you Martin Garrens’ wife?”

  “No, goodness no, dear.” In an instant something softened in Mrs. Garrens’ face. “You must have come to visit Alice.”

  “I don’t know if you knew that she was sick recently.”

  “I read it in the paper, that she passed. I’m sorry.”

  Eleanor knitted her fingers. “So, I’m here in England because I came to visit Alice, to meet her, really. I live in New York.” She heaved a sigh of exasperation.

  “What moved you to call me?”

  “Coming to England, I found some letters in my mother’s things and some of them were from a Martin Garrens, from Scarborough, so I came.”

  “I see.”

  “I have to admit, I’m really at a loss here.”

  Mrs. Garrens went to the piano, picked up one of the frames, walked slowly back across the room, and handed it to Eleanor.

  The frame was heavy, old and made from silver. The picture was faded. The young woman in the picture had curled blond hair that reached the top of her jeans. A thick leather belt was cinched tight at her waist, and she wore a loose paisley blouse. Next to the young woman stood a clean-cut, handsome man fat with joy. They both looked filled to bursting. That was all she saw.

  “Do you recognize your mum?” Mrs. Garrens said.

  Eleanor looked more carefully and her heart jumped seeing the unmistakable eyes and the way her mother always stood with her right leg akimbo, a familiar self-conscious smile on her face. It was almost the face Eleanor remembered.

  She looked up at Mrs. Garrens, but didn’t like what she felt in the room. All confused, in Scarborough, on a Wednesday morning.

  “I do,” Eleanor said.

  “It’s your mother and Martin.”

  Eleanor looked more closely at the picture.

  “That’s Martin Garrens.”

  “It is.” She sat down beside her.

  It was an uncomfortable sitting room. All the chairs were a little too far from any table, so you had to reach to pick up or put down your teacup or reach for another cookie. The chairs looked as hard as folding chairs and the couch was not only firm, but the material that covered it made Eleanor’s skin itch right through her clothing.

  The couple in the photograph leaned against a convertible car that was parked in a wide driveway. There was a stone house in the background, and it looked like summer, because there were flowers in pots and the man was dressed in a short-sleeved shirt and shorts. The man wore sandals.

  “My mother lived here in Yorkshire, I know.” Eleanor was trying to find a story in the picture. “I assume that’s Trent Hall behind them,” she said. With a shallow layer of tears on the surface of her eyes, she looked at Mrs. Garrens.

  “I assume you came because you want to know.”

  Eleanor nodded.

  “Your mother and father . . .”

  “I don’t think my father was ever in England. I mean, I’m sure he wasn’t, unless he didn’t tell me. He’d never been to England, and my mother wanted him to come here.” Eleanor felt a sense of panic rise.

  Mrs. Garrens now looked like an owl. Her fat face became the most pleasant face Eleanor had seen in a long while. It was a yielding face and now it was broad and Eleanor saw the round, brown eyes—clear and unaffected as a child’s. She smelled of talcum powder, lipstick, and Yardley perfume.

  “I should go,” Eleanor said.

  “You can certainly go,” said Mrs. Garrens. Eleanor didn’t get up. Mrs. Garrens offered her another biscuit. Comforting and nourishing and sweet, all in one round cookie.

  “You’re a dear girl. May I say that?” Mrs. Garrens waited.

  Eleanor’s almost imperceptible nod.

  “Put your feet up.” Mrs. Garrens seemed to know her. Eleanor tucked her feet under herself on the couch.

  Eleanor hadn’t noticed how deep was Mrs. Garrens’ voice, and when she spoke, it was as if she had candies in her mouth that she moved around without letting them get in the way of her well-enunciated words.

  “I don’t know which place to begin, because I suspect now you’ve managed to work it out. More or less.”

  “I don’t know what you mean. I haven’t worked anything out . . .”

  Mrs. Garrens looked around the room as if she were looking for something more to give to Eleanor. She sat forward, turned her body, her hands folded in her lap. She had a sad and hopeful thin smile on her face as she went on, “Your mother and my son Martin, they knew each other as children.”

  “Right. That part.”

  Mrs. Garrens took Eleanor’s hand, as if it were the most natural thing to do, as if she had comforted Eleanor’s confusion since she was a small girl.

  “Martin loved your mother with all his heart and there was a time when she loved him, too.” She waited a bit. “I see him in you.” Now, Mrs. Garrens’ eyes welled with tears. “I’m your grandmother.”

  Eleanor turned away. She studied the face of the man in the frame, the man who stood, casual and at ease, beside her mother. “I came here looking for him, because I found some letters from him to her. I never had reason to wonder, to ask her. My mother died when I was young.” She looked at Mrs. Garrens. “I think I wish I hadn’t come. This is more than I was prepared for.”

  Tired beyond words, she thought of her own father, John Abbott, who had loved and raised her. “I never met him, did I?” Then Eleanor remembered a memory, a fragment that held itself at the edge of her sight almost all the time, a puzzle she’d just set aside.

  There had been a man at the pier in Los Angeles. A friend of her mother’s, who had watched her on the Ferris wheel, and then taken them for tacos. She had tasted the salty rim of his margarita.

  “God, I did meet him, didn’t I? I did.” From one edge of her eyes to the other, both eyes let forth a smooth wash of water on her cheeks, around her nose, over her lips, and dripping from her chin onto the sweater.

  With hardly a sound, she cried, except she kept repeating, “I did, I did.”

  He had stood watching them ride the Ferris wheel. The ocean was behind him and seagulls were everywhere, screaming. Every time the wide chair came down and swept close to the ground and then back to go around again, she saw the man watching them. There was a lost look on his face and he frightened her a bit, until when they climbed off, her mother introduced him as a friend and pretended it was a strange coincidence he should be there. Eleanor had known she was pretending.

  He had taken Eleanor’s young hand and bent forward in a gentlemanly bow. He might have said she was pretty or lovely or called her a princess, and then he had suggested they get Mexican food somewhere, and there was a place right at the end of the pier.

  Her mother had been happy on that trip to California. They had seen him again. He’d invited them to the opera Carmen, and they’d dressed up. That night her mother had slipped out of the hotel room and come in very early in the morning, but Eleanor was too young to think anything of it till now.

  Eleanor’s face was wet, but she’d stopped crying. Her mouth was open so she could breathe as pictures streamed through
her mind like she was watching a movie. There was nothing Mrs. Garrens could do but witness it. A mountain of silent compassion, she held Eleanor’s hand.

  “Well.” A deep inhale and the handkerchief wasn’t adequate to the job, so Eleanor dabbed her face with the arm of her sweater, which made both women laugh and broke up the awfulness. “Well, some things make more sense now.” Eleanor had a good enough heart that she could laugh.

  “I’ve been reading letters, meeting . . .” She decided against telling Mrs. Garrens about the ghosts. “Learning things from every direction, and all the time, this is what I came to find.” She sniffled and stood. “I think I should go now. I’m going to walk to my car and drive home now, but maybe we can meet. Another time.” She was drenched in sadness. “You know, the craziest part of all this is that I’m going back to that big house that’s supposed to be mine. You know the house, right? You must have known my mother for a long time.” Eleanor sniffed and ran her fingers through her hair, wrapped it into a bun, and looked for her glasses. Mrs. Garrens handed them to her. Just after another sniffle Eleanor said, “Well, I suppose I’ll stay long enough to meet him.”

  Mrs. Garrens’ bust rose and fell and her eyes closed in a sad, slow way.

  “Oh, God, I shouldn’t meet him?” Eleanor said.

  “I think you should sit for a bit more. If I may say, I think it would be better to stay a little longer.”

  Anne went on impact. Martin was gone but didn’t die till almost a week later. His heart was strong, the doctors had said.

  Went and gone and passed. The impact intense. It was a lorry that had hit them. A runaway lorry. None of the words made any sense as they rattled in Eleanor’s head like a lurid chant.

  Mrs. Garrens sat still and asked nothing of her. She let her be silent and in the silence Eleanor remembered being in her family’s living room when she was twelve. Her homework page, she could see it as if it were present. The grain of the wood table made her pen stick, so she put a book underneath the page and eavesdropped on her parents’ conversation. He was irritated that Anne had to go. There was a concert and a reunion of people who’d known each other, but her father, John Abbott, was not being asked to go. “You said not to let you go to Yorkshire without me,” he reminded her. Eleanor remembered the strange tone in her mother’s voice when she said, “It’s different now.” And he didn’t go.

  Coming out of her reverie, Eleanor asked, “What was the concert they were going to?”

  “The concert?”

  “My parents were talking about it, before my mother came here.”

  “Ah, that, yes, it was the reunion of a concert they’d been to thirteen years or so before. They all got together that summer, friends from years ago. They came from all over, but Annie came the farthest, and there was a small concert, in memory of the great Free Festivals at Stonehenge. That’s where they were.”

  “Right,” Eleanor said, “that’s what they were talking about. They were going to a reunion of what—what were the Free Festivals?”

  “They were something like your Woodstock,” Mrs. Garrens said. “Music and young people roamed around amid the ancient stones. It was a great big concert. Your mother had come back to visit—she hadn’t been back since she left at fourteen—and it was the last concert they let them have there at Stonehenge, before they closed the place to protect the stones. Anne was already engaged to your father, to John, by then. They were young still, little more than teenagers. She had been in America for a long time, but for Martin, Annie was his only love. His whole life, Annie was.”

  “His soul,” Eleanor said without inflection.

  Mrs. Garrens got up and walked in small circles.

  “That summer when she came back from America, they ran about, almost like they were running from something. They’d both been to college, but they played like kids, like puppies. They swam in the ocean from here to Whitby, had picnics with friends, went a little crazy with the feeling that something important was ending.”

  “How do you know I’m his?”

  “They knew you were theirs,” Mrs. Garrens said.

  “Did my father know?”

  “John? I don’t think so, no. He didn’t know.”

  “I think he knew, at the end.” Eleanor’s voice was frail.

  “Yes, he might have known then.”

  “Why didn’t she stay here and marry Martin?”

  Mrs. Garrens hesitated. She wanted to get it right though she wasn’t certain of the answer. “She loved John. I don’t think she knew she was pregnant when she left. She went back and married him, just as they’d planned.”

  Her mother had had a choice between two men. Her mother couldn’t inherit the house and didn’t wear the ring. Eleanor’s head was spinning with superstition, facts, and nonsense. What she’d lost and what she’d gained. She wiggled the ring off her finger and held it in her fist, slipped it in the pocket of her jeans.

  “Eleanor, you know it was heaven for her, being a mother to you. She talked about you all the time, that last time she came, all about you and what you were doing, that last summer. You were just a young girl then.”

  Eleanor chewed the inside of her cheek, nodded. She felt cold creeping through her as the facts fell into place. “So what happened, exactly?”

  “Well, as I said, there was the reunion. Anne and Martin decided to drive together, just the two of them in his car, down to Stonehenge. It was a crowd of them that went, but Anne and Martin went in his car. I don’t know what they were doing. I don’t know what they were thinking. I wasn’t privy to most of it.”

  The room had turned as dark as a thundercloud, but a heater close to Eleanor’s legs glowed with red stones. There was something about England that held her, not in a warm way, always, but still it held on to her even when tossing her about. She’d found one father, lost a vision she’d had of her mother, and lost her true father in some way. She’d grown stronger, not just physically, not just from the exercise of walking against fierce shifts in wind on the moors, but psychically, she’d grown more vulnerable, accessible, exposed.

  Even though it was gray and cold, even with awful things coming and going, she felt something balancing. Something moving in the right way, unstuck and unwinding like the swing on the hill with its arc all wild and uncanny.

  “After the reunion, Anne and Martin decided to stay the night in Bath. The next day, they went for a picnic, went back to the place they’d been to all those years before, a picnic up on Solsbury Hill. A beautiful field where they’d been together, when they were still young, when your big soul first stepped into the world.”

  With tiny movements, Eleanor shook her head.

  It might have been the first time Mrs. Garrens had had a chance to tell the story, and so, after clearing her throat again, she went on, “It was late afternoon. Your mum had a flight out the next morning. They were on their way down a narrow road, the one that leads from the gate where they’d parked and walked up the hill to picnic and take in the view. The top was down on his car and she had a scarf around her hair. I imagine they were happy. Anyway, it was then, right there around the bend”—it was clear she had a vivid picture of the geography—“at that crossroads where they would have turned left to head home, that a lorry came barreling down that hill and lost control.”

  They called it a runaway, because it was out of control.

  The front of the lorry was taller than the top of Martin’s convertible—the car small and the couple inside even smaller.

  Mrs. Garrens took a deep breath.

  Eleanor wasn’t breathing. “They’d gone back to the place where they made me?”

  Mrs. Garrens’ eyes were complicated with feeling. “Yes.”

  “And it killed them,” Eleanor said.

  “You mustn’t think of it that way,” she said, quiet and firm. “It was an accident.”

  It
killed them, Eleanor thought. The wrong love or the right love gone wrong, it killed them. “But why didn’t they stop? Why did they keep seeing each other?”

  “They didn’t. I don’t think they did. That last visit . . . it happened as it did . . .” Mrs. Garrens didn’t have an explanation.

  As much as Eleanor wanted to screech, They kept seeing each other, like a teenage girl in a warranted rage, They wrote letters and visited each other. She let him see me and didn’t let me see him. She never told me about him. I don’t know how many places she went to be away from us and be with him, she didn’t say anything.

  “Excuse me a moment.” Mrs. Garrens tucked her hair into place as she left the room and went up the staircase.

  Eleanor poured herself a cup of cold tea and added some milk, then she got up to leave. She was stepping into her boots in the hall when Mrs. Garrens came back down the stairs. “I wanted to give these to you. I tried to find some ribbon and collect them. They’re pictures. They’re for you.”

  She handed Eleanor a box wrapped in flowered paper tied with a bit of twine.

  “Thank you.”

  “We won’t say good-bye.”

  “No,” Eleanor agreed.

  “Let this settle. Come back and I’ll make you a meal. We’ll have a meal together.” They pressed their cheeks against each other, first one side, then the other.

  Eleanor had pulled off the A170 and was looking for the posted gas station when her cell phone rang. In searching for it, she reached under the passenger seat and scratched her arm on a piece of metal. Finally she answered, exasperated.

  “Yes.”

  “It’s me. Hey, I was wondering about you.”

  “I’m on my way”—Eleanor slowed the car and pulled over, parked on a grassy patch on the side of the narrow road—“back.”

  “That’s good. I’ve missed you.”

  She didn’t say anything.

  “Did it go well?”

  “Not so well.”

  “Disappointing. Are you all right?”

  “I don’t want to . . .”