It must say something about my relation to reality that I had never tried to locate Devon on a map. But I had noticed, in Julian’s study, a Times Atlas jutting out from the top shelf, which I now took down and opened to a map of the British Isles. And there it was, my lost Eden, in the bulge of the jagged peninsula tapering off to the west. Devon. The West Country.
I foolishly supposed that Julian would be as pleased as I was over my discovery. Finally I would tell him the whole story of my father’s desertion, and the aborted trip to Devon, and he and I would go there, he could show me all the places my father had described. After that things would be different between us, we’d have found our connection.
Except I never got to tell my story. As soon as he returned home I began, excitedly, to explain about finding the drawing, I thought of that as the preliminary part, to be hurried over, but he cut me off: “Where is the bloody thing? What have you done with it?” And when I told him it was in the study, with the atlas, he brushed past me and came back holding it away from him; he marched out the front door and left it propped against the dustbins. “I’d forgotten it was there,” he said grimly when he came back in. “I would have got rid of it ages ago.”
“But why? Isn’t it the house you grew up in?”
“It is. Which is precisely the reason I got rid of it. You have answered your own question. Well done. Now shall we go to the pub? It’s snooker night, remember?”
That Sunday, though, by prearrangement, we went to see the drawing’s maker, at the flat in Elm Park Gardens where their mother had installed her.
“She seems very taken with her new nanny,” Julian had said when he got off the phone with Sasha. “Everything is referred back to her—we’re to be given tea by Daphne, Daphne is so looking forward to meeting us, et cetera.” I really expected Daphne to be like a nanny, stout and motherly, but in fact she was a slight young woman with a Dutch-boy bob and a shiny face. I wondered if she was a Quaker, if she had taken on this job in the spirit in which someone else might join the Peace Corps.
She ushered us into a pale gray room where Sasha waited on a pale green sofa, looking like a parody of normalcy, the picture of Blandly Average Womanhood in an avant-garde play: dumpy, secretarial, in drip-dry brown trousers, a beige blouse, a brown cardigan; her short brown hair was permed, her blue eyes almost hidden in little rolls of shiny-smooth fat. Isabel had said she was longing to see Julian, but she stayed put when we entered, she didn’t even reach up and put her arms round his neck as he bent to kiss her. Instead she clenched her jaw, turning her face away, so that the kiss landed on her hair. There was a mottled red flush on her cheeks that remained the whole time we were there.
Having taken our coats and seen to it that we were seated, Daphne excused herself to go prepare our tea. “Give a shout if you need any help,” Julian said. He had not yet addressed any remarks to Sasha, beyond Hello.
“So you’re from America,” she said to me, in a high, aggressively bright voice, full of barely concealed rage. I couldn’t tell if she hated me for being Julian’s girlfriend or if she was taking her revenge on him for staying away for so long. “Aren’t you lucky. I adore America. I’d love to live there.”
“Are you sure about that?” Julian asked mildly. “I seem to recall you were only there once, for about a week, when you were twelve.”
She didn’t even look at him. “I have the most glorious memories of it. And of course I see it all the time, in the cinema. I love the way Americans smile, with all their teeth showing. Though you’re not smiling. What are you doing in this country, anyway? I mean, apart from fornicating with my brother. What made you come here?”
It did not seem like the time to tell her about Eliot, or my trip with my father. So I said feebly that I had always had a thing about England.
“Really. How odd of you. What sort of thing?”
Oh well, I said, trying for lightness, I guessed it had started in earnest when I read Jane Eyre.
“Yes? And what else?”
Well, and the rest of English literature, I said, feeling increasingly foolish.
“Such as?”
Such as Keats, I told her, and Coleridge, and George Eliot, and Wordsworth, and Virginia Woolf.
“I see. So you’re here because of a lot of dead people, is that right?”
I supposed so, I said.
“That’s not awfully healthy, you know. You could wind up very very unhappy if you go on like that.”
On the contrary, I said recklessly, my relationships with dead people had given me some of the happiest times of my life.
She looked at me in triumph. “Then you really shouldn’t have come. Because, you know”—she leaned toward me—“they’re not here anymore.” After that she turned her attention to Julian, telling him about a dream she’d had, in which they’d been skiing down a slope together. “Do you remember that time in Pontresina, Junes? That awful instructor with the wart on his nose? Was he actually called Adolf, or was that just our name for him?” She and Daphne were planning to go to Italy that winter, she said, maybe to Umbria. Then she said abruptly, “You haven’t told me what you think of my new digs. Would you care to see the rest of it? I’m thinking of redecorating, I don’t like all these calming colors. What do you say? Wouldn’t this room look better in shocking pink?”
“That sounds delightful,” Julian said, drawling out the word, and she stuck out her tongue at him just as Daphne reappeared, bearing a lacquered tray with a teapot and cups and little iced cakes, which she set down on the low table by the couch.
“So did Isabel make you come?” Sasha asked him, over Daphne’s head. “Isabel comes to see me all the time. Isabel the Good. We’re like some allegorical figures in a medieval painting, Issy and me, a tree full of red berries, with the good sister on one side and the evil one on the other.”
“I thought we’d agreed you weren’t going to talk like that anymore,” Daphne said gently. “You remember what we decided about evil.” She held up the sugar bowl, which had little peasant figures painted on it in red and blue, and asked if we took sugar.
“You’re getting confused,” Sasha told her. “It was Issy you decided it with. My theological sister. Not me. Anyway, he knows what I mean, don’t you, Junes?”
“I wish you’d stop calling me that,” he said calmly, taking the cup and plate Daphne held out to him. She had already given me my tea and cake.
“Well, I’m sorry. I do apologize.” Her glance shifted to me. “Why aren’t you eating your cake?”
“I was just about to.”
“You must eat it, it was bought specially for you. For your visit here today.” She watched while I took a bite. “Now you have to tell me it’s delicious.”
“It is. It’s very delicious.”
“Extremely so?”
“Yes, extremely.”
“Good. Though the nutritionist says sugar is a depressant, I have to eliminate it from my diet. Not because it made me fat, either, because it didn’t. It’s the meds. They put little globules of fat in those pills, to puff out your cheeks, so you can’t have sex.”
Meanwhile Julian was talking to Daphne, who had seated herself on a low chair in the corner. “How did you get into this line of work? Do you have a degree in psychology?”
“No,” Sasha said loudly. “In English literature. Like your girlfriend here. Only Daphne went to UCL, and Annie probably attended…I wouldn’t like to guess. Some of those American universities have the most extraordinary names, as Mum might say. ‘What an extraordinary young man…what an extraordinary idea.’ You see how it’s done. What she really means is ‘Sasha, you worthless cunt.’ It’s quite simple once you get the hang of it.” She smiled kindly at me. “I used to be literary myself, you know, I was always declaiming poetry to the dogs. Lord Byron was my passion. But now I’m like Mr. Brooke, in Middlemarch—remember what he used to say, how he went into all that at one time, but he saw it wouldn’t do? That’s exactly right: I saw it wouldn’t do. Now I confine myself to Joanna Trollope. Better than diazepam. Better than ECT even. Good. You’ve eaten all your cake. I hope you don’t think my brother actually loves you, that would be too pathetic.” And to Julian, “But they’re always a bit pathetic, aren’t they, Junes? I mean, the ones I’ve met. Of course there could be others who were real tigers, I wouldn’t know about that.”
“All right, that’s enough,” Julian said, getting to his feet. “Time to go.” He turned to Daphne. “Thank you for the tea.” And because I went on sitting there, blinking, “Come along. We’re leaving now.” I rose and followed him, making little noises of embarrassment at Sasha, who ignored them; she was rocking back and forth on the couch, humming loudly. Now I can’t phone Isabel and report, I thought miserably. She might even blame me for things going so wrong.
Daphne followed us into the hall. “I’m so sorry. I’m sure it won’t be like this the next time you come.”
“Nothing to apologize for. I’m used to it.”
“It’s just unfortunate that you caught her on a bad day.” But by that time we were on the stoop, and he was ushering me down the steps; he pretended not to hear. For a minute we stood on the pavement; the sun was just beginning to set, the sky was a clear darkish blue over the orderly line of white houses. I almost said, “I love this time of day in London,” but that was too inane, while anything more real seemed freighted with danger. I hung back for a moment, afraid he might touch me. Once again, the little game we played, as though we were an actual couple, had been upended, the pieces were scattered all over the board.
Even Julian may have felt it. He was unusually silent, getting straight into the car, staring straight ahead while I arranged myself on the seat next to him. We drove off through the leafy, peaceful streets, and then through Knightsbridge, past the Brompton Oratory, Harrods, Harvey Nichols, the silence extending itself past the point where it seemed rescuable. By the time we reached Hyde Park I had tried out a dozen possible lines in my head and rejected them all. Then I came up with one that seemed safely neutral. “It’s strange how the three of you look so different.”
“Why? Do you look so much like your brother?”
“Yes, as a matter of fact. A lot like him.”
“Well, aren’t you the lucky one. Or, excuse me, should I say he is.”
We went sailing past the Wellington Arch, which even then, with the atmosphere in the car coagulating by the minute, gave me a secret thrill, a sense of grandeur that I could not connect to the evils of imperialism.
Finally, when we were stopped at a red light on Edgware Road, I took a deep breath and said, “She’s sick, you know that.”
“She’s also exceptionally nasty, in case you didn’t notice. I didn’t much care for the way she treated you. Or the way you crawled to her, for that matter.”
“I wasn’t crawling. I was just trying to be polite.”
“Rubbish. You were positively obsequious.”
I told myself he was upset, he was simply taking out his wounded feelings on me. His hands on the steering wheel were trembling slightly. But it seemed he had only begun. He glanced over, shifted gears, shot forward. “Of course you’re like that with anyone English. The people whose country it really is. Even at the pub the other night, you had to step aside and let those two little tarts walk in ahead of you. As though to assure everyone that you’re not one of those aggressive Americans, not you, you know your place.”
It was such an unexpected line of attack that I almost had to admire it. I filed it away for future consideration, while saying in my snottiest voice, “It doesn’t take a shrink to figure out the connection between that outburst and what just happened. If you’re angry about the things she said, I don’t blame you. But don’t take it out on me. Now, do you want to talk about it or not?”
“What is there to talk about? My sister is a mad bitch, full stop. And you chose to pander to her. I think we can dispense with the amateur psychology. Though I realize it’s your national religion. The American creed.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“Sorry. Mustn’t be opaque. Must remember who I’m talking to. You seemed about to trot out that revolting phrase the Yanks use. Getting in touch with one’s feelings. Isn’t that it? Which I’m not really in the mood for right now.”
“Fuck off.”
“I merely wanted to clarify. Tell me, is it your father that you and your brother jointly resemble? The departed Mr. Devereaux? Or his madam? And what was Mrs. Devereaux’s maiden name? Thibodeaux?”
“Let me out of this car.”
“Don’t be ridiculous. We’ll make our way back to Rona Road, where you can pack your belongings if you like, and flounce out in style.”
But when we arrived, the skinny, harried-looking woman from next door, whom I’d exchanged occasional smiles with by the gate, was standing on the street with her two small sons, having locked herself out. “So stupid of me,” she said helplessly, without much conviction, as if she wasn’t really surprised. “But would you mind if I used your phone for a minute? I want to see if a friend of mine can put us up until the locksmith in Gospel Oak opens again tomorrow.”
Julian gave her his most charming smile. He had a better idea, he said; they should come inside while he phoned around for a locksmith who worked on Sundays.
“Oh, how kind of you. You’re sure it’s not too much trouble?”
“No trouble at all.” I settled her and the children in the front room and went to make tea and fetch the milk and chocolate digestives. Julian was pacing around the kitchen with the phone to his ear. “I’m talking about a single mum with two kiddies, mate, and you say in your advert you provide twenty-four-hour service. Let’s think about that for a moment, shall we? I presume you know there are laws about false advertising.” Even to me he sounded impressive, a bully in a righteous cause. “You can charge me whatever you want. Just get here. Within the hour.” He gave the address, made the man on the other end repeat it, hung up as I was piling the tray with the tea things and Cokes and biscuits, and took it from me.
Together we soothed the woman, assuring her we didn’t mind a bit, and tried to divert the children. Julian asked which team they supported, and teased them about the departure of someone named Frank. By the time the locksmith arrived, sporting a blue Mohawk and multiple piercings, and we had waved them off, the woman still offering fluttery thank-yous and prodding each boy to thank us in turn, it was somehow impossible to rekindle the fight, though we didn’t look at each other either. He turned on the radio news, and after a couple of minutes I ostentatiously picked up my Anita Brookner from the living room table and marched off to the conservatory. But I couldn’t concentrate on the tangled relationships in the medical library. I thought about going to a movie, any movie, just so he’d wonder if I was coming back.
Then I remembered I’d been going to phone my brother, to tell him to call our mother. And suddenly I badly wanted to hear his voice.
Once I had felt closer to him than anyone. We used to huddle by the boiler in the basement when our mother was asleep, planning our escape from Gurneyville. He was going to be an artist; he would show me his drawings, and I always said they were brilliant, though I couldn’t tell if they really were. He was going to live in Paris when he left home—we were so naive we thought Paris was still where artists lived—and work on his paintings until he was discovered. For his birthdays, and for Christmas, I would give him books on Rembrandt or Vermeer, or Winsor & Newton paints I’d bought with my babysitting money.
On the wall of our living room in St. Paul is a framed drawing of a woman in a medieval headdress, a copy he made of a Holbein, from one of the books I gave him. It must have been one of the last drawings he made, because around the time I went off to Stony Brook he stopped doing art and took up drugs instead. The night I came home for Thanksgiving he went out with his friends after supper and was still not back at midnight; even on Thanksgiving, after the ritual meal, with the donated turkey and the sweet potatoes mashed up with marshmallows, these mysterious friends of his showed up at the curb in their car, honked the horn once, and waited for him to emerge; they never came to the door. “Just some guys,” he said, when I asked who they were, and my mother, when I questioned her, only shook her head resignedly. “At least he’s not up in his room all the time, playing that thumping music.”
Every night I waited for him in the living room, and as I rattled on, trying to engage his interest, he edged his way toward the door, smiling a vague polite smile. I wanted to know if he had a girlfriend, or maybe he’d discovered he was gay, but first I had to win him back. I told him about my roommate, who was very homely, but obsessed with her appearance; she applied face masks every night, she read Vogue and Harper’s Bazaar and hardly ever went to class. I told him about my Contemporary Novel professor, who wore his shirts opened almost to the waist, and soft suede boots almost to the knee, and gazed out the window in silence for a moment at the beginning of every class, before making some musing remark about the nature of time. “Honestly, you can’t imagine what a pretentious jerk he is,” I said, with more animus than I really felt, while Adam went on grinning at the air. I heard myself babbling on, I knew I was boring him, but I couldn’t shut up. And finally, having inched his way across to the hall door, he’d say he was wiped out, he had to get to bed.
He looked younger than when I’d left, his skin so clear and milky it seemed impossible that he ever needed to shave. He looked, in fact, like the eight-year-old I used to take by the hand and walk down to the stream to watch the kingfishers in the days before our father left. It must have been the drugs that were smoothing him out, though I didn’t know that then. He’d just stand there smiling as though at some private joke as he sidled away.
I decided he was angry at me for going off to college and abandoning him, that he was punishing me with silence. The last morning I was home I went and knocked on his door, and though he didn’t say Come in, only asked Who is it?, I opened the door and walked in anyway. He was lying in bed, not smiling for once; he seemed cross at me for interrupting whatever he was doing, which appeared to be nothing.
“I feel bad,” I said, which was true, but my voice was false, because it was such a conscious effort to break through. I sat on the end of his bed, as I had a thousand times, though now I felt like an intruder. “I’m leaving today, and I’ve hardly even seen you; we haven’t really talked.”
“Don’t feel bad,” was all he said. He plucked at the bedclothes, averting his eyes from me; he kept bunching up the sheet between his fingers and then letting it go again and starting over.
“But I do.” I took a deep breath and went on, with the same false directness. “How are you, Adam? I wish you’d tell me.”
“There’s nothing to tell. I’m fine. A little tired right now, that’s all. But fine. Don’t you worry.”
“How are things at school? How’s Mrs. McGrath?” She was the art teacher at the high school; she too had encouraged him, had even invited him to her house sometimes on Saturdays, and shown him the postcards she and her husband had brought back from their trips to Italy.
“She’s okay,” he said, still without looking at me. “She’s fine.”
“Have you been doing any new drawings?”
“Not really…I’m sort of taking a break from art, you know? Just for the time being. Thinking about what I’m going to do next.”
“Okay. But I hope you’ll get back to it soon. You’ve got a real talent; you’ve got to do something with it.”
“Oh, yeah. Yeah. I will. You don’t have to worry about that.” Now he looked up; I could tell he was willing me to go.
“You just don’t seem very happy, that’s all.”
“Actually,” he said, and laughed loudly, “actually, I’ve never been so happy in my life.”
“Okay, then. I didn’t mean to pry. I just need to know you’re all right. I love you, you know that.”
“Sure,” he said, but he didn’t say he loved me too. He had a sly look to him then, as though he were laughing at me, which he probably was. A year later he dropped out of high school and went to live in a fifth-floor walkup on Fifty-Sixth Street and Ninth Avenue in Manhattan, with a bathtub in the kitchen. When I took the bus down from Stony Brook to see him, there were needles lying in plain view on the counter; he went out a few minutes after I arrived, and didn’t come back. A few months after that he disappeared, to resurface in Pittsburgh, where he worked in a video store—cum—head shop and took up tantric yoga. The last time I saw him, he was living with a sixteen-year-old runaway—he had just turned twenty-seven—and selling knock-off sunglasses and watches on the street.
That day I phoned him from Julian’s he sounded stoned and surly, not at all pleased to hear me; he was doing the odd bit of construction work, he told me, to pay the rent, but his real job was managing indie rock bands, “the dudes who are making the real shit now, only the plastic capitalists can’t deal with it.” He had just lined up a booking at a club in Cincinnati. “Maybe I’ll get a gig over there, for one of my bands, and come visit you.”
“That’d be great,” I said, and he gave a snorting laugh, either because he knew it wouldn’t happen or because I so clearly didn’t mean it. For a minute we were both silent, and then I reminded him to phone our mother, and he said he would, groaning, before telling me he had to go, he was supposed to check in on a rehearsal across town.
Upstairs, in the bedroom, the television was on, which meant Julian was settled in for the night. I grabbed the bottle of Glenfiddich from the bottom of the pewter hutch and locked myself in the study.
Pretty soon, swigging from the bottle, I was laughing and crying hysterically; one minute the scene with Sasha struck me as a great piece of comedy, I couldn’t stop giggling, and a minute later I’d be convulsed with sobs, though in the schizzy way of drunkenness the sounds I was making seemed to come from somewhere outside me. Finally I fell into a gummy sleep, a long confused dream about searching for my brother in Citicorp Center, dodging the security guards as I darted through doors that said KEEP OUT. When I woke in the morning, with a woolly head and a foul taste in my mouth, I lay there for a long time, willing myself to do what was necessary: wash my face, pack my things, call for a minicab. Only what address could I give the driver? The hotel in Bloomsbury, the airport? And what would I do with myself then?
After what seemed like hours, when I knew the house must be empty, I forced myself, wincing, to stand up. A postcard of the Matterhorn lay on the carpet just inside the door. I turned it over. “Sorry,” it said on the back. “I know I was a beast. It’s my ghastly family, we must stay away from them in future.” Underneath was a clumsy drawing of a creature with fangs.
Stupidly, stupidly, my heart gave a little leap. I sat back down, reading the message over and over, reading into it a whole slew of strangled feelings, love and regret and sorrow he didn’t know how to express. But maybe he would learn, maybe everything would be different. And if I stayed there I could tell myself, I could even believe, that it wasn’t from cowardice, it was out of magnanimity, womanly forgiveness. That night, when he returned from work, he was especially charming, he’d even brought me a bunch of white lilies, and before too long we wound up in bed.