TWO HOURS LATER ISABEL found herself in a Sussex town called Gilder-on-Ouse. Which, not coincidentally, is where Sir Clive Dunkirk supposedly lived. At least according to her Google search.
She’d set the destination on her GPS as a whim. Not because she had any delusions about finding him—if Mrs. Mary Trevelyan had made her butt literally sweat with nerves, imagine what an encounter with Sir Clive could do—but watching Sussex unfurl in green ribbons through her car windshield seemed like just the thing to settle her nerves and pride and Malcolm angst. It was as good a destination as any.
Two and a half hours into the drive her GPS dead-ended her on a road that lead to what appeared to be veritable sea of green dotted with polite, uniform little conifers.
So different from California’s behemoth redwoods and pines. It was bordered by a low rock wall that looked rather charmingly Medieval in a crumbling, mossy way.
And boy, was it quiet.
She couldn’t hear any other cars, let alone people. A lone bird chirped.
She parked the car and got out to stretch her legs and and unclench her hands, which had been gripping the steering wheel pretty tightly, and she bathed in the silence. She decided to venture over that little rock wall for a few sylvan photos before she got back in the car.
She went still when she heard a muffled booming sound. Sounding, somewhat ominously, like a cannon being fired.
What the hell?
She was badly startled when she noticed a man standing near a tree, wearing Wellingtons and a big, green wool coat and a worried expression. He’d visored his eyes with his hand and was gazing off into green distance. His bald head gleamed like a pearl.
He suddenly pivoted in alarm.
“Where the devil did you come from? Don’t you know you’re trespassing, young lady?”
Isabel hadn’t been “young ladied’” in years. “I’m so sorry,” she stammered. “I had no idea. I didn’t see a ‘No Trespassing’ sign and I—”
“We’re out in the middle of bleeding nowhere! We didn’t think we’d need a ‘No Trespassing’ sign here! Are you one of those Heliotrope fanatics? Come to take a souvenir from his property? You lot would pick our trees bald if you could.”
She blinked at the barrage of admonishment. Holy crap. Was she indeed on Sir Clive’s actual land?
“No! God. Yes. I’m just...I’m an American on holiday, and I drove down a road that looked enticing—and I wound up here. It looked so lovely I got out to stretch my legs before I turned around to try to get my bearings.”
He studied her with narrowed eyes. The poor guy looked irritable and very tired. If he worked for Sir Clive, she had a hunch the job wasn’t a picnic.
His expression softened ever-so-slightly. God. Did he detect a fellow beleaguered soul?
Something about his long-suffering expression prompted her to issue full confession.
“Okay. To be truthful, I do know Sir Clive lives in this town. And I am a huge fan. I promise you I did not know this was his land, however, and I will leave now.”
The man stared into her face and gave a short nod, as if she’d passed some sort of test. But his glare hadn’t lessened in intensity.
“You’re not with a tabloid or a reporter, are you?”
“No.” She cleared her throat. “I know this will sound crazy, but believe it or not, Sir Clive and I appear to be distantly related. I recently acquired my family tree, and I was quite humbly honored to see him on it.”
Humbly honored? She sounded as though she were accepting a Grammy.
She plucked her iPad from her purse and brandished it
The man looked at it and a sort of mordant, cynical amusement flashed across his features. He gave an enigmatic little head-shake.
“You’re lucky Sir Clive didn’t accidentally shoot you,” he muttered.
“Shoot me?” Oh God. “Has Sir Clive...gone bonkers?” One never knew with rock stars.
“No, he’s just out hurling his ex-wife’s shoe collection into the air and shooting it into smithereens over the...well, yes, he’s starkers.” The man said this half to himself. Not without affection.
“In a rock star way, mind you,” he clarified hurriedly, turning back to her. “He’s not the best shot. He doesn’t have to be, as he doesn’t like to kill things, but he does like to make noise. But there’s a lot of land out here and he owns every bit of it so the chance of him shooting an actual person is rather low. Ah, speak of the devil. Here he comes. Holding a brace of shoes.”
And from a distance, like something she’d dreamed after eating pizza too late at night, a man wearing a frock coat, jeans and Wellingtons was looming into view. Tall, vast of shoulder, lanky limbed, his famous, once-titian hair rippling like gray smoke behind him.
Dear God in Heaven. She was tempted to hurdle the wall and run back to the car. But she was, apparently, frozen for all time where she stood. Her mouth parted in shock.
“Well, well, well,” Sir Clive said, when he was near. “Who’s the bird, Beedleman? Friend of yours? Let me have your hand, darling.” Isabel’s hand went out as if he were a snake charmer. “Charmed,” he purred, and bowed over it. “She doesn’t look like a tart. How refreshing if somewhat discouraging.”
His eyes were an astonishingly vivid blue, brilliant in the magnificent wreck of his face. It was clearly sculpted by nature and the content of his days, and was somehow gorgeous. And fascinating.
“Stand down, Sir Clive. You’re related to this bird, so she says,” said Beedleman, wearily.
Sir Clive visibly stiffened.
“You’re not my so-called daughter, are you? They do emerge from the woodwork now and again.” He eyed her with a sort of baleful resignation. “Give her my lawyer’s number, Beedleman.”
He pivoted a quarter turn.
“Sir, um, Mr. Clive, I’m actually your cousin. Isabel Redmond. Well, your cousin after a...after a fashion.”
He paused. Turned. And stared at her, fulsome with incredulity, for a full, silent three seconds.
And then he straightened to his full imposing height.
“Whatever it is you want,” He said grimly, “the answer is no.”
Her mouth dropped open.
“Oh, don’t look so doe-eyed and shocked, darling. Everyone wants something from me. And you have that sort of trembling desperation writ large aaaall”—he swept a long finger in a circle, as though he were casting a spell meant to turn her into a toad—“over you. So what is it? What do you want? It’s now or never. Out with it.”
Isabel went thoroughly hot, clean through all of her cells, it felt like, then cold, then hot then cold again. God only knew what color her face was. She could have told him that any trembling desperation, if it indeed was detectable, was likely related to a certain tall doctor.
“I’m a jewelry designer. And I spoke with Postlethwaite’s. They said that they’d be willing to c-c-consider my designs if...” Oh God. She was babbling. Why was she even talking? Because when would she next see Clive Dunkirk? The answer to that was “never.”
“Oh, now, let me guess.” He arpeggiated his fingers against his chin. “If I agree to star in a commercial? To reunite with Heliotrope and play a show? Those are the usual requests. And you came straight here, and I’m to admire your ‘gumption’ isn’t that so?” He heavily air-quoted those words.
She was struck dumb.
“Well...maybe not admire it, per se,” she managed. Faintly.
He blinked.
His expression warred between hilarity and incredulity. The resulting love child of those two emotions was exasperation.
“Let me ask you, Isabel. What have you done in your life that leads you to believe that you warrant one particle of my favor? Besides watch stupid American romantic comedies in which heroines are rewarded for ‘pluck’?” He made the word ‘pluck’ sound as as though it meant the ‘f’ word it rhymed with.
She was stung. “I hate those. And you’d know that if you saw my jewelry collection.”
Way to stay on message, Isabel, she thought.
“Then explain yourself, pray. Why the hell are you here? What makes you think we’re related?”
The words rushed out. “I have a family tree here.” She showed the iPad again. “I grew up as a foster child in a lot of homes and I never knew my family or had a family and I just recently discovered I’m related to the Redmonds and Everseas and here is the family tree. I’ve met many of them now and you’re on it, too...way, way off to the right.”
There was a little silence.
“Off to the right, am I?” he said a sort of unnerving quiet.
“Um, yes. My jewelry is in fifteen stores in the San Francisco Bay area and sold online at my website. Postlethwaite’s has a...a.... process so they suggested that you may have some influence, and since we’re...we’re, er...family...”
“Fifteen stores, yeah?”
His voice had the hush of a man whose patience had been planed to near transparency.
She struggled not to visibly swallow.
“Yes.”
“Let me ask you....Cousin Isabel...” Had any word in the history of the world ever been issued so ironically as ‘cousin’? She thought not. “How do you think having your jewelry in the Postlethwaite’s will change your life? Do you think it will give you value? Imbue you with a sense of worthiness you perhaps feel has heretofore been lacking? Because you’ve been chosen by the precious Postlethwaite’s? Is that why you’ve come out here on this fool’s errand?”
She was speechless.
She realized within seconds, the short answer was “yes.” but 1) she was damned if she was going to say that out loud; and 2) she was annoyed that the notion hadn’t occurred to her since she was usually pretty good at sussing out her own motives; 3) and an equilibrium-shattering epiphany was more than mildly inconvenient at the moment.
Sir Clive made an exasperated sound. “Just look at your wonderstruck face. I’m not some sage on a mountaintop, for fuck’s sake, all those Gandalf comparisons lazy reporters love notwithstanding. I’m merely old. There are advantages to this condition, and one of those is I can now recognize the motives of other people from a thousand yards away.”
He stepped toward her, and the full force of his personality came with him. It took all of her fortitude to not step back.
“Cousin Isabel, I was the second oldest of eight children. Born post-blitz. We grew up mostly hungry and dirty and me da came home from the war a damned crippled hero, and became a drunk to endure it, and, I daresay, us. I was an ordinary gutter rat and I worked to help out me mum from the time I was nine years old years old doing anything I could. And then,” he leaned forward a little, so that she could feel his breath on her face, and issued each word of the next sentence with slow, ironic emphasis, “I learned to hit things with sticks in a loud and rhythmic fashion. And now I’m a millionaire.”
She couldn’t speak.
Which was fine, because he wasn’t done.
“I have done things with groupies that would make the devil blush, I have smoked everything you’ve ever heard of and a lot of stuff you haven’t, I’ve had my blood replaced once and I’ve been to rehab twice and I’ve been married thrice. I’ve been knighted and benighted. I’ve performed before thousands and sold millions of records and I’ve been near deafened by the screams of an audience and by my own drums and Jordie’s guitar. I’ve known joy nearly terrible in its ferocity and darkness, equally, and every emotion between. I am now sixty-nine years old, and can definitively tell you that the only thing in life that means a damn is a place to call home and someone with whom you can lie next to in the dark and quietly weep, or laugh, or fart.”
Isabel couldn’t get a breath; it was as if she’d landed hard after a great fall.
He arched a single woolly red-gray brow to punctuate his message.
And then Sir Clive Dunkirk stalked off toward the house, massacred shoes bobbing over his shoulder.
* * * * *
The ‘irrepressible Isabel’ of yore might have shouted after him: “I’ll take that as a maybe!”
Grown-up Isabel cried in the car on the way back to Pennyroyal Green.
The tears were more emotional exhaust than anything else, a byproduct of a combustible swirl of outraged injustice and....arrgghh.......dammit it all....
Shame.
Because at a certain point in his monologue she’d all but floated up out of her body and could see herself with excruciating clarity through his eyes. At the age of sixty-nine he clearly no longer felt obligated to suffer fools or intrusions with anything like grace, and she could hardly blame him. And while he was hardly a martyr—lord knows he’d given Bacchus a run for his money— he’d likely been surrounded by takers and sycophants his entire career.
And that’s what he’d assumed she was: A taker.
And she’d never been a taker in her entire life.
Oh, the scalding shame. Not to mention the scalding injustice!
And while it was entirely possible she’d caught him on a bad day—an emotionally grounded man seemed unlikely to be out shooting shoes—he could have been a little nicer.
She finally pulled over to the verge and cut the engine to try to get a grip.
She took a deep breath then exhaled at length.
The truth was, even when she did something subversive like tattoo her own finger—the one that Malcolm had been so unnervingly insightful about—she’d planned it. She’d executed her rebellion, flawlessly, with subtlety and precision. It wasn’t like her to just waltz into Postlethwaite’s and ask to see the manager or to yammer at Sir Clive Dunkirk, of all people, after stumbling onto his property.
It was just that navigating a slew of unfamiliar emotions was like trying to keep her car on the road in a stiff wind.
A place to call home and someone with whom you can lie next to in the dark and quietly weep, or laugh, or fart.
She didn’t think she’d be embroidering that on a pillow any time soon.
Funny, though. She had a hunch Olivia and Lyon would have espoused a similar philosophy, in different words. She’d never had that sort of thing with anyone.
She closed her eyes, and thought of the expression on Malcolm’s face before he’d pulled his helmet back on and zoomed off. Her breath hitched. Joy and terror suddenly seemed like different facets of the same emotion, one she didn’t quite want to look at head on. Not yet. Maybe not ever.
And maybe she’d never see him again, anyway.
Boy, that notion sure fit like an itchy sweater.
She knew of at least one person who would be happy to hear from her.
She texted Laura:
“I just met Sir Clive Dunkirk.”
Laura, who was up very late, as usual, probably reading a Janet Evanovich book, texted back:
“WOW. I once took my top off in the front row of a Heliotrope concert. What can I say? It was the 70s.”
Isabel’s jaw dropped in pure delight.
She loved that subversive streak that apparently ran through the whole family. From the wild child mother she’d never really known, all the way back to Olivia, who’d fallen in love with the son of her father’s enemy and had been passionately devoted to abolitionist causes.
Mischievously, Isabel texted back a whole row of horrified cat emojis, and then added:
“P.S. I just asked. He said he remembers your boobs.”
She laughed, imagining Laura’s expression when she read that.
And she felt just a little better. A little more centered. The people who cared for you were like...the chassis a life.
She the car back on the road, and the green, soft beauty of the scenery—the rightness of it—washed over her, and she was halfway to soothed by the time she got home.
Home.
Funny how she thought of it that way so easily.
She stopped in at a market along the way and bought some groceries to bring upstairs to her little flat.
She didn’t want to be alone, suddenly, and usually that’s precisely what she wanted when she was working through any angst. She wasn’t certain her own recognizance was to be trusted tonight.
So just as the sun was dissolving into a pool of tangerine on the horizon, she fished the just-purchased bottle of tequila out of her shopping bag and knocked on Poppy’s door.
Poppy swung it open and whisked Isabel with a worried glance, perhaps anticipating more bleeding. She beamed when she saw tequila bottle.
“My horoscope said something like this would happen!”
She tugged Isabel inside.
* * * * *
THWACK.
THWACK.
THWACK.
THWACK.
The rainbow colored ball was about the size of a plum and had a pleasing density and a perky bounce. It had been left behind in one of the exam rooms by one of the six-year old Pitney Twins, who felt like the Pitney Quintuplets when they visited the clinic with their mother.
Malcolm wasn’t certain how long he’d been throwing it against the wall between his office and Finn’s, throwing it and catching it and throwing it and catching it and throwing and catching it.
It was Wednesday evening, and the clinic was experiencing a rare lull in the usual stream of visitors. So he’d sunk into his old office chair, which was shaped to him like a cricket glove after these years, put his feet up on his desk, and pored over this week’s events, moment by moment, word by word, like it was security footage from a crime scene
Clamoring about the fringes of his analysis were emotions like Indignation and Self-righteousness. He’d certainly had no real obligation to answer any of Isabel’s questions about Jemima. Yet he couldn’t shake the lingering sense that he had done or said something fatally wrong, overlooked something, missed an opportunity. This jarring uncertainty was an unfamiliar sensation.
It had been eons since he’d been confronted with something he couldn’t quite diagnose.
In the end, it came down to one thing: when he thought of Isabel spending an entire evening with Argosy, he couldn’t breathe. And this sensation worsened as the minute hand on the little clock (his grandfather’s, at one time) on his desk inched closer to eight thirty. The time Argosy had told Isabel he’d pick her up.
And to think that when he was leaning next to her at that fence rail, it was as if all the oxygen in the universe had been replaced with champagne.
THWACK.
THWACK.
He gave a start when Finn appeared in his office doorway and snatched the ball out of mid-air before it hit the wall again.
“What,” Finn said slowly, with great, strained patience, “the bloody hell is wrong with you?”
Malcolm considered the question a moment.
“I don’t actually know.” He confessed this on a mordant hush.
Finn slapped a hand against the doorframe to brace himself in feigned shock. “But...but....you usually know everything.”
Malcolm just said, “Yeah.”
Finn’s blue eyes were excellent bullshit detectors, which made him a truly fine clinician and an irritating friend. He was examining Malcolm with them now.
“You were a moody fuck most of yesterday, too.”
“I suppose I was.”
“And you’re not denying there’s something wrong with you. Which means there is something wrong with you. ”
“I would say that’s a fair diagnosis. I don’t know what to call it, though.”
Finn studied him a moment longer. “It’s a woman.”
After a few incriminating beats of silence: “Maybe,” Malcolm allowed cagily.
“What are the symptoms?” Finn sounded genuinely curious.
Malcolm opened his mouth.
Then shut it.
He didn’t have words available to him, so much as sensations, and fragments of memories, vivid as stained glass. Her eyes, her blush, her tears clinging to her eyelashes, her face glowing in the sunbeam up on the altar, her laugh, her wit.
He said the first thing that came to mind.
“Well, she has blue eyes,” he began, very, very cautiously.
“And?” Finn prompted
“Every time I picture them, my breathing gets...well.... clinically speaking, I believe my...” he thrust his hands up through his hair, pushed it back and sighed heavily, as if unburdening his soul of a terrible sin. “...my heart actually skips a beat.”
Finn’s jaw dropped.
“Holy shite,” he breathed after a moment. “That might be the gloppiest thing I ever heard.”
Malcolm shifted one shoulder up and down in resignation.
“So the problem is....” Finn prompted.
“I don’t know if she’ll talk to me again. It...got weird. A little complicated. And she’s only here on holiday.”
“Oh, it’s the American bird.” Finn was fascinated now.
“How the hell did you—“
“Poppy Allgood is friends with Louisa George who is friends with Molly Sheridan who told me about Poppy Allgood’s new American neighbor in her building when she mentioned how her American cousin just had a stent put in.”
Of course. Small towns. And people did tend to talk to Finn.
“How did it get weird between you? You didn’t tell her that story about the party you went to in Norwich when you were at university? It’s not as funny as you think it is.”
Malcolm eyed him balefully. “No.”
Finn tossed the ball and caught it. Then tossed the ball and caught it.
“Good ball, isn’t it?” Malcolm said.
“It is,” Finn said, sounding pleased. “I think we should keep it. The Pitney twins will either try to swallow it, flush it down the toilet or feed it to their dog.”
He threw it back to Malcolm, who caught it. They would return it to the twins, of course.
“All I know, Malcolm, is that when something is genuinely important, when your back’s against the wall, when things are awkward or banjaxed...you always seem to know the right thing to do. So if that’s how you feel...do whatever feels right. And if you don’t know what that is, maybe this isn’t as important.”
“Thanks,” he said dryly.
Though....it wasn’t actually bad advice.
He’d been examining his feelings under a microscope when what he really needed to do was pan out from them. As Finn had just pointed out indirectly, his instincts were good. He knew what he wanted to do. And where he wanted to be. Understanding the “why” behind that would have to wait.
“Anyway, Coburn, do you think you can suffer angst over this woman without annoying the life out of me tonight?”
Malcolm got up from his chair. “I can definitely do that. Because I’m going to the Riot.”