A Simple Life

Disorientation rocked her. She put out a hand to steady herself in the rushing air.

Someone had sent the disc spinning away on the wrong trajectory. There was a chorus of jeers and the players ran after it in an eager pack. The woman PhD stumbled on the bank and landed on her outstretched hands, but she pushed herself up again and ran on, anxious not to be left out. The shadow of his cap’s peak cut sharply across Matt’s face.

Dinah did not want him to see her here. She could only think of getting away before anyone noticed her. She shrank backwards, two or three steps, then turned and fled for the shelter of the trees.

‘It was only a frisbee game,’ Nancy said. ‘Why are you so angry?’

They were in the Pinkhams’ yard, laying out cutlery and paper napkins. Nancy had had her hair cut in the summer and it stood out in a cottony floss around her face, making her look not many years older than her little girls. ‘Even Todd plays it.’

‘It wasn’t the game. I’m not angry.’ Dinah couldn’t express to Nancy the failure of recognition and the confusion that had come with it, or the sense of loss at being excluded from a closed circle of shared interest and common purpose that mocked what her marriage had become.

Matt was happy here.

How had that obvious fact somehow escaped her? She was lonely; Matthew was considerate and careful of her, almost as if she were an invalid, but on his own account he was happy.

‘Damn it. Nancy, I sound a miserable shrew, don’t I?’

‘Uh-huh. You don’t deserve him. And oh boy, are you a misery. You never come over here and make me laugh when I’m ready to scream, do you? You aren’t funny or cute or a great mom or anything?’

‘Aren’t I?’

‘Shit, Dinah, what’s wrong? You know you are.’

Simple. On the face of it.

Dinah shook out a gingham cloth and twirled it like a matador cape. The boys were up in the trees hanging candle lanterns from the branches. Todd had lit the barbecue and there was the scent of charcoal. Later there would be a full moon.

‘I miss home,’ she offered pathetically, trying to explain something away. She patted the cloth over a table and smoothed the wrinkles.

‘Sure you do. Anyone would.’

‘About Matt, you know? There’s all this talk of how busy he is, and the research, and all the other administration work to keep up with and the travelling to lectures and conferences and the pursuit of funds. And then I go round there and they’re all playing bloody frisbee?’

‘Listen up. That’s the way it is. You have to let them have their importance. It’s the same with Todd, the hospital hours and the crises and being the only one who can do anything right. They have to show us they’re out there hunting and gathering. They’re men, aren’t they?’ Todd was an intern at the local hospital.

Nancy’s plump-cheeked face was smooth and shining within the halo of hair. Dinah felt a surge of affection for her and ashamed of deflecting her friendly concern with only a sliver of the truth.

They had not become close friends. Nancy made Dinah feel cynical and partial and foreign. They spent a good deal of time in and out of each other’s houses, and Dinah was sparky and ironic in her company, but it was as if with her clothes and manners and eccentric theories of motherhood she was playing the role of a certain kind of Englishwoman to meet Nancy’s expectations.

‘You’re right, darling. Men are men and all too explicable, and woman are supreme beings full of wit and insight and beauty. Now then, where shall we put all this bread?’

‘French loaves, if you don’t mind. Maria Berkmann has only been back for four days but I think if I have to listen to any more about Lyon and Côtes-du-Rhone and TGV pronounced tay jay vay, I shall start hollering.’

‘Thanks for the warning. Otherwise I might have put the noise down to the hopelessly unGallic Californian Chardonnay.’

Laughing together, the two women went on laying out plates and knives.

When they finished Nancy said, ‘You don’t want to worry about Matt. Just let him get on with what he wants to do because he’ll do it anyway, regardless.’

That much was true. Matt always got what he wanted. He worked out in his methodical way precisely what it was, and as soon as he had identified it he went ahead and got it. He was never blurred, never impetuous or unconsidered. Dinah knew him so well, and yet he could reveal himself to her as a total stranger.

‘You’re probably right.’

‘I know I’m right.’ Pleased with herself, Nancy gave a little affirming nod. ‘I’ll tell you something else. You should do something for yourself, instead of just for your husband and kids. You should get yourself a job.’

‘Right. Hillary Clinton could probably use a little help. I’ll call her.’

‘I’m serious.’

‘Nancy, I know you are. Thank you.’

Todd appeared dressed in a lemon-yellow Ralph Lauren Polo shirt. Nancy turned to him at once.

‘Todd, are you planning to barbecue tonight or do I have to do everything?’

Dinah went home to change her clothes and tidy the boys.

‘Clean T-shirt, Jack.’

‘I don’t want to change. I don’t think it’s necessary, in fact. This one’s good enough.’

‘All right.’

‘So if Jack doesn’t have to, then I shouldn’t have to either.’

‘All right.’

‘When’s Dad getting home?’

A minute later they heard his Toyota drawing up, and Matthew banged through the front door. The spring was still not fixed. His blue shirt was tucked in again and he was bare-headed. The boys leapt at him and he looked over their heads to Dinah.

‘I like that dress.’

She smoothed the bright yellow linen with one hand. She had dressed carefully, but Matt had seen the outfit a dozen times before.

‘Busy day?’ she asked.

‘Yep, pretty busy. The usual.’

‘You’ve got time to shower before the party.’

We are so careful of each other, Dinah thought. Solicitous, as if we have some sickness between us that is never mentioned, even though the pain gnaws.

Matt groaned. ‘I’d forgotten the party.’

He made for the stairs, with a child hopping on either side. Watching him, Dinah saw that his shoulders were hunched and there was a prickle of grey in his hair. She remembered the lithe man across the grass who had seemed a total stranger to her, and tried to knit together the two images. They made an uncomfortable hybrid. We are Matt’s responsibility, she thought. He shoulders the weight dutifully. And work is his resort and comfort. When did it happen, this switch?

She thought back involuntarily and then stopped herself, pinching off the flow of recollection.

The guests arrived, headed by the Berkmanns. Max Berkmann was wearing French workman’s overalls. Mr Dershowitz was missing because he was in hospital, and the four graduate students had moved on. Dinah had never really got to know the good-looking one any better than to exchange affable nods across the street.

‘Bit of a failure,’ she had joked to Nancy.

‘Matt’s better-looking anyway, and he’s got full tenure.’

It was a good party. The moon hung above the trees, heavy and orange-tinged, and the children’s candle lanterns glowed amongst the dry leaves. The Kendrick Street neighbours were pleased to see each other after the long vacation and there was plenty of news to exchange.

Jack and Merlin went off with Tim Kerrigan. Dinah caught a glimpse of them in one of the bedrooms, sitting in a line with legs stuck out in front of them and chins sunk on their chests, watching a video. Just lately, her children had stopped making unfavourable comparisons between Franklin and home. They seemed to have stopped thinking about England altogether.

Dinah flitted from group to group, laughing and talking. She had drunk two quick glasses of wine in the kitchen with Nancy. Two or three people told her she was looking well, that her summer tan suited her. She listened to Max Berkmann describing the idyllic year in France.

‘I tell you, we would have stayed right there in Mâcon if there was any way I could have fixed it.’

‘Here, Dinah.’ George Kuznik was partial to Dinah, and he shifted to make a place beside him on the garden seat. The darkness was warm and scented and within it the lanterns made oval patches of fuzzy golden light.

George’s voice rumbled in her ear. ‘A cold beer and you. What more could a guy ask for? You know, I always think this is the best time of year. After the heat, waiting for the fall, before the cold comes.’

Talking without listening to herself, Dinah said something about not much looking forward to another New England winter. She was overtaken by a sense that this place was still utterly strange to her, and by the mysteriousness of the people around her, even her husband. The landmarks of habit and logic and certainty were dissolving. She was on the outside of all this talk, detached from the physical world even with George Kuznik’s bulk pressing against her thigh, and she was losing her ability to decode the messages that were flashed to her.

She was afraid they would notice; everyone would notice her singularity.

With a beat of panic Dinah wondered if she might be going mad.

She turned to George suddenly and took hold of his hand. Anchoring herself. His palm was moist, surprisingly soft. George’s domed forehead reflected the lantern overhead. He leaned forward and for a moment she thought he was going to kiss her. A bubble of laughter forced itself upwards but George only asked solemnly, blinking a little.

‘You all right, Dinah?’

The garden began to coalesce again around her. The fearful dislocation was passing. Dinah did laugh now, and the laughter eased her throat and slackened her face. She released George’s hand and set it back in his lap, registering the flicker of his disappointment. Beyond him she saw a big man emerge from the house and stand on the porch steps, hands on hips, his gaze panning across the garden.

‘How much have I had to drink?’ she smiled.

‘Aw, and I thought it was my charm that was intoxicating.’

Dinah kissed George’s cheek then leaned back, separating herself from him. ‘You’re a good neighbour,’ she said truthfully. They both drank, allowing the tiny awkwardness to pass.

‘Who’s that?’ She indicated the big man who was now strolling between the groups of people. His height and commanding manner gave him a seigneurial air.

‘A friend of Max’s, Todd must have asked him over. Name’s Ed Parkes. Have you heard of him? He writes thrillers. Pleased with himself, but a decent sort of guy. His wife’s British, now I come to think of it.’

Later in the evening when the party shifted indoors and the children began to reappear and rummage for leftover food, Dinah met the Parkeses. Ed had a huge handshake, and his face creased into affable crinkles while his shrewd, light-blue eyes examined her. He told her that he came originally from Detroit but he and his wife had a house in the woods outside Franklin, and one in London where they spent part of the year, and a chalet in Zermatt. He talked easily, amusingly, but in the slightly overbearing way of a man accustomed to being the focus of attention. At last, but with a suggestion that it was out of good manners rather than real interest, he turned the conversation to Dinah.

‘I don’t have a job here,’ she told him. ‘I used to be in advertising, in London.’

‘Doing hearth and home for a while?’ He was appraising her.

‘That’s right.’ She was grateful for his way of putting it.

Your husband’s the scientist, isn’t he? I must have a talk with him. I can always use special expertise.’

Dinah was amused at the idea of Matt’s work being good for nothing more than extra colour in one of Ed Parkes’s airport blockbusters. She bit the corner of her lip, and then realised that Ed had followed her thoughts as plainly as if she had spoken them aloud. He was grinning down at her.

‘You think I’m full of shit?’

‘Not at all.’

‘Not much. Hey, I want you to meet Sandra. Here she is. Sandy, this is Dinah Steward. You’ll like each other, and not just because you talk the same language.’

Sandra Parkes was in her mid to late forties, tall and pale and thin, and very beautiful. She had the kind of flawless finely featured face that make-up artists and cameras fall in love with. Dinah didn’t dare to squeeze her hand when she took it in case the pale skin bruised.

‘What’s he said?’ Sandra asked.

‘Nothing you can’t contradict if you wish, honey.’ Ed sauntered away. His made-to-measure shirt sat comfortably across his massive shoulders.

‘Nothing worth contradicting,’ Dinah told the woman coolly. Sandra was wearing a complicated outfit of layers of gossamer fine wool and chiffon and slippery satin. Dinah had often wondered, as she flicked through the fashion magazines, what colour greige might be. It came to her now that this was it. It was so subtle and refined that it made her cheery yellow linen look by contrast like the flowering of some tenacious garden weed.

‘It’s never worth disagreeing with Ed,’ his wife murmured. ‘He believes that he’s right and he almost invariably is. I think it’s the act of believing itself that does it.’

Dinah smiled. Surprisingly, but distinctly, she felt herself warming with interest in Sandra Parkes. It was not her clothes, or the way she looked, or even what she said. It was the sound of her faint English voice and the half-swallowed, descending semitones of irony and deprecation.

Ed Parkes might look like a bull elephant and sound like a hick, but he was as quick as a whip. The stirring of empathy was not a matter of sharing a common language with Sandra, nothing as obvious as that. By the bare movements of her lips and the darting little gestures of her fingers, Dinah knew where Sandra came from. She could read the text of Sandra’s background just as surely as Sandra could read hers.

Within a few moments the women were perched side by side on the scrubbed pine of Nancy’s kitchen table, exchanging the common currency of their histories in a way they would never have done at home in England, or even in New York or Los Angeles. Whereas the links would have been taken for granted there, here they seemed surprising, remarkable. They had both grown up in the Home Counties, the only children of career servicemen. Sandra’s father had been in the Navy, Dinah’s in the Army. There had been overseas postings, and then from the age of eleven, good safe girls’ boarding schools within a sensible radius of London. After boarding school there had been long interludes of rebellion. And then for both of them, marriage to men from backgrounds entirely different from their own.

The Parkeses lived for part of the year in London, Sandra explained. Ed liked to be there when he was writing. Zermatt was for a month or six weeks at Christmas and Franklin was where he claimed to feel most at home.

‘But Ed gets bored quickly. In a month he’ll be fidgeting, working out a trip to somewhere.’

‘And you?’ Dinah asked.

Sandra sighed, looking sideways at Dinah through the pale and silky bell of her hair. ‘I would like to feel …’ her elegant fingers shaped a box in the air ‘… located.’

Like me, Dinah thought. Correctly located. It must be this need in both of them that Ed Parkes had recognised. Talking to Sandra had stirred a hundred associations within her. Her Englishness called up the inessential details of home and history, but it was not those details Dinah felt severed from only what they contained. A secret, embedded in England like a fly in amber. She couldn’t explain the severance to Nancy or Dee or George Kuznik or anyone else, nor could she talk about it even to Matthew.

Most of all, not to Matthew.

She couldn’t even think about this. She had to keep them sealed away, all the connected threads, or they would snake loose and whip and whistle around her.

‘Do you have children?’ Sandra was asking.

Yes.

‘Yes, two boys. They’re here somewhere.’

‘Of course. I met them earlier. One of them said to me “You see, dinosaurs had tiny brains relative to their bulk.”’

‘Jack. The younger one is Merlin. And you?’

Sandra plucked at the filmy top layer of her draperies. An odd wary note sounded in their talk. Each of them heard it and interpreted it for herself, without wondering if the other did the same.

Sandra said, ‘One. A girl. She’s fourteen now.’

Fourteen.

Dinah felt a jolt, and the tidy focus of her attention scattered like beads in a kaleidoscope. She made herself say smoothly, ‘You must bring her over, the boys would like it.’

Sandra’s narrow shoulders lifted. ‘I don’t know. Perhaps. She’s quite difficult …’

Impulsively Dinah put her hand on Sandra’s arm. ‘Aren’t they all? Listen, why don’t you come and see me? One day next week. We’ll have lunch, just the two of us. Will you?’

There was some connection between them, not yet identifiable, beyond the mere similarity of their histories.

‘Yes. All right, I’d like that. I’ll come while Milly’s with her tutor. She doesn’t go to school just at the moment. Ed travels so much, and I like us both to go with him …’

For a second, Sandra’s pale eyes held Dinah’s imploringly.

From across the room, Matthew was watching them. He saw Dinah touch Sandra’s arm. It was okay, he thought. Good. Dinah needed a friend over here and the writer’s nervy wife might be the one. He had liked the writer himself, for all his bullshit. But there was a shiver of impatience with Dinah. She was needy, and once she had been strong. He had drawn on her strength, of course. Made himself with her help.

The equation was different now. He was concerned for her, for Dinah separately and the two of them together. But still there was the chafe of exasperation, the raw edge of worn-out patience rubbing the smoothness between them.

The boys were in bed and asleep at last. Even Ape had given up his clicking and thumping and settled in his basket in the laundry room. In her bathrobe, Dinah sat in front of her bedroom mirror brushing her hair. When she was a little girl her nanny had taught her to brush her hair every night, just so, counting the strokes. Not that she did it, then or now. Why tonight? Because of the associations crowding in on her? Dinah remembered her parents coming into her bedroom while she sat at her dressing table, her mother in a cocktail dress with a stole round her bare shoulders, her father resplendent in his uniform. A kiss on the top of her brushed head. A cloud of Arpège and her mother’s hands resting on her pyjama shoulders. Their two faces reflected one above the other, a blurred half-formed version under the poised lipsticked one. Eleanor always so perfect. Yet they were alike, hair and eyes and colouring.

That mother-daughter link broken. Eleanor, long widowed, in England, in a bungalow on the south coast. Elegant, bridge-playing, lonely probably. Herself with her two boys. Tufty hair, their father’s, an odd whorl at the back of three heads.

‘Are you coming to bed?’

Matthew was already there, propped up with the inevitable scientific journal.

Dinah untied her robe, and slipped under the covers. Matthew put his reading aside and turned out the light.

In the darkness he asked, ‘Are you all right?’

‘Yes. Of course.’

She had not mentioned the frisbee game. Scientists’ wives often feel excluded. Someone had warned her, at the very beginning. The Prof’s wife, back at UCL, that was it. It’s like a very exclusive club. The exchange of ideas, the stimulus, the sheer thrill of it all. Most of them enjoy it more than sex, dear.

It wasn’t the obviousness of her own exclusion from the club that had hurt her, though. It was the sight of Matthew’s unclouded happiness. And as she thought this Dinah felt a stab of self-disgust like a spike driven into her neck.

He reached out for her now. She knew that they would make love and they did, in their tender and considerate way that masked other feelings nothing to do with tenderness or concern.

Afterwards Matthew mumbled sleepily, ‘I love you, you know.’

‘I love you too,’ she answered. And thought that the divide between love and hatred was a very fine and fragile one.

Dinah dreamed of England. It had become a place of steep hills, each hill revealing another beyond it, all of them with pale roads winding to their rounded summits like illustrations in a child’s picture book.

TWO

The road climbed as it led deeper into the woods. There were no more houses to be glimpsed between the trees, nor were there any mailboxes at the roadside.

‘Have we missed it?’ Dinah wondered as she drove, peering ahead to where oblique shafts of sun filtered through the branches. The leaves were showing the first margins of butter-yellow and crimson. In another two weeks the fall would be in full blaze.

In the back seat Merlin looked up from his GameBoy.

‘101 was miles back.’

They were looking for 102, the Parkeses’ house.

‘How do I get to the next level of this? Jack?’

‘Give it here. You’re so dumb, I’ve shown you this already. Look, there’s another sign.’

A yellow arrow stencilled 102 pointed onwards.

‘I wouldn’t want to live out here,’ Jack said.

‘Aw, too creepy for you? The deep dark woods are full of monsters?’

‘Too boring, in fact, Merlin. Like you.’

‘Stop bickering,’ Dinah snapped.

‘Mum, we aren’t bickering. Can’t you tell the difference between argument and conversation?’

Opposition to her was the only factor that united them, Dinah thought. Nothing was new.

‘Sandra Parkes complains that Camilla is difficult. She can’t be as bad as you two.’

‘Camilla, what a totally sad name.’

‘Sort of like some disgusting pudding, Camilla-and-custard.’

‘Pink and wobbly. I bet she’s really fat.’

The boys snorted and retched, united also by their unwillingness to make the visit to the Parkeses.

Matthew seemed to hear none of this. He had been silent most of the way, sitting with his eyes turned to the woodland flickering past.

He was thinking about his work; ever since the summer, when the present avenue of speculation had properly opened up to him, the thought of it had never been far from his mind. Even when he surfaced from sleep he was aware of it rising again through the membranes of semiconsciousness.

He was thinking about his engineered molecule now, his inner eye turning it so that it twisted elegantly, three-dimensional, a dense cluster of atoms floating free in black computer space. Which group should he change, to make the molecule more active?

Frustration and excitement simultaneously prickled within him.

The first tests were encouraging. His technicians had demonstrated that the enzyme material he had engineered was beginning to function as it should, partly binding to the surface of IM-9 lymphocytes, and so indicating that it would bind to some extent to insulin receptors on the surface of cells. The question now was which part of the beautiful structure to change, to make it work better, to make it perfect?

His eyes were unfocused but he saw the sign first. And the mailbox beneath it. Matthew pointed.

‘There, look. I thought the place would be somewhere at the top of this hill.’

The road was dipping downwards ahead of them. Dinah compressed her lips but said nothing as she swung the Jeep sharply into the driveway. There were more trees, conifers and birches pierced by airy columns of sunlight, and then they emerged into a wide space at the crown of the hill. The Parkeses’ house rose in impressive stone and timber tiers against a sombre belt of firs.

Before Dinah had parked beside Ed’s Porsche a door opened in the bottom tier and Ed himself emerged.

‘Great, so you found us okay, no problems? Come on, come on in. Sandy’s looking forward to it.’