TEN

 

 

 

 

The nearer the van took Rose towards Los Angeles—the dream-like passages over hills dotted with juniper trees, the descents into swathes of sea-green lowlands, the tunnelling through black forests bordering deserted roads—the more elusive Dr. Wheeler became. It was disconcerting. Sometimes, when there was nothing on either side of the track other than jagged rocks sloping down to distant valleys speckled with toy cows, he vanished altogether. Perplexed, she took out a photograph of him, the one she’d snapped at Charing Cross station, hand raised to obscure his face, wrist encased in the crocodile-skin strap of his watch.

‘We’ll find him,’ Harold said. ‘You mustn’t worry.’ He sounded kind, really understanding.

That night they stayed somewhere in a region called the Badlands, where, as the sun began to drop, the fiery hills and cliffs stopped blazing, fading pale rose and gold. The flies were particularly fierce and Harold spent the night squirting the inside of the van with a fog of insect repellent. In the end, Rose clambered out to seek sleep under a heaven hazy with starlight.

She was trying to work out what she would tell Polly and Bernard on her return. She would have to keep to herself what she felt about Harold, because he was their friend. He had, in fact, had a long discussion with her the day after the incident with the gunman, to do with his behaviour towards her, his lack of patience. It was due, he’d said, to his foolish expectations of what it might have been like—the two of them seeing such wonders of nature together—and his reaction to the way things had actually been between them. He was sorry, he said, if he’d been difficult, but she ought to understand that he wasn’t used to spending time with a woman, not since the loss of his wife. It was clever, Rose thought, the way he shifted blame away from himself.

She’d nodded and said she quite understood, although if the truth be told she hadn’t found him difficult, or rather she was so used to his sort of response that it hadn’t bothered her. She didn’t mind how he treated her, just as long as he got her to Dr. Wheeler. His attitude was no different from that of her parents. He was unsure of who he was, frightened of who he might be. He rambled on a lot about being open with her, but he hadn’t mentioned a word about weeing in his pants at the bank.

Harold stopped in a town near Yellowstone Park, anxious to make a telephone call about his investments. Above the drugstore in the dusty main street hung a tattered cutout of Santa Claus, sitting in his wagon without any reindeer. Americans, Rose thought, were very keen on Christmas. The men on the sidewalk were dressed like cowboys and most of the ladies tapped by in white high-heeled shoes. Behind a shop labelled ‘Happy Hunting’, a giant blue globe perched on stilts reared up towards the sky. Harold said it was a water tower.

He sent her into the post office to buy stamps while he went to make his call. There was a Wanted poster of James Earl Ray, killer of Martin Luther King Jr, on the main wall. Stuck there, it was much more startling than the image that flicked on and off on television screens. Plucking up courage, Rose asked the man behind the counter if she could have it. It would make a nice present for Polly and Bernard.

‘In my country,’ she explained, ‘all of us are very anxious that Mr. Ray should be brought to justice. I’ll display it inside the House of Commons.’

It took time for her request to be understood—they thought she was a foreigner—but after she’d told them she was a close relation of the Prime Minister of England, permission was granted and she walked out with the poster rolled up under her arm.

They entered Yellowstone Park in mid-afternoon. Rose knew about it from geography lessons at school. It had lots of hot springs bubbling spouts of mud, and one, Old Faithful, which shot up seventy feet into the air every day, on the dot of half past five. You could set your watch by it. Some of the redwoods were a million years old and a mile high; there was one with a split in its trunk wide enough for a car to drive though. The campsite had lavatories adorned with funny signs, ‘Jack—Jim’ for the men, ‘Joan—Jill’ for the women, and strings of coloured lights slung between the trees.

They parked in the smallest site, away from the giant trucks and trailers, the Rest-U-Easy and Komfy Kampers, because Harold said they turned their generators on at night and it grew too noisy. When he began his daily shenanigans, sweeping out the van and rinsing the squashed flies off the windscreen, she tried to help by gathering up the newspapers from the driving seat. He told her to leave off; he could manage.

She was sitting on a hillock of grass nearby when a tall man with a red face approached.

‘Hi, fellow travellers,’ he shouted, ‘Trust you’re not too done in.’ Harold said he wasn’t.

‘Praise be to God,’ the man said. ‘It’s the wife’s birthday and I aim to give her a good time. Be mighty pleased if you and your daughter would join us.’

‘That’s very kind . . .’ began Harold, on the way to a refusal. The man took no notice. ‘Sure could do with a helping hand,’ he continued. ‘There’s stuff to be moved if you folks are up to it.’ Reluctantly, Harold nodded; he wasn’t brave enough to back out.

He spent less than an hour constructing tables from lengths of wood laid across boxes before returning to his cleaning. Rose stayed longer, gathering wild flowers and stuffing them into jam jars. The scarlet-faced man thanked her. His smile was warm, but his eyes were cold.

Nothing happened until dusk. Harold couldn’t wait that long for food and fried himself two eggs on the paraffin stove. He looked careworn. Rose changed into a flowery skirt, and a blouse that had belonged to her mother. Harold drew attention to the moth hole in the collar.

The red-faced man was called Hayland. He was obviously on good terms with God, for he kept calling on Him to look after the meat roasting on the spit above the fire. His wife had big bosoms and went by the name of Saucy Sue. Owing to the attention Hayland gave to her buttocks, the patting, the fondling, Harold said it was out of the question that they were married. For once, Rose knew he was right. She had never, ever, seen Father touch Mother in a saucy way.

No more than two dozen people assembled under the fairy lights, in spite of the numerous tables. Hayland was disappointed, that was obvious. He kept wandering into the trees and shouting, ‘Roll up, roll up. Everybody welcome.’ And he drank a lot.

A man in a baseball hat attached himself to Harold. They sat outside the radiance of the fire, perched on upturned buckets, beer cans in hand, deep in conversation. A boy with the beginnings of a moustache questioned Rose about the Beatles. He was very hesitant and kept saying he was sorry if he was bothering her, but had she ever met them? She said she believed two of them had attended the art school round the corner from where she had once lived, but no, she had never actually seen them. His mother pushed in; she too was unable to utter a sentence without apologising for being intrusive. Within minutes, Rose was surrounded by stout women and muscular men expressing themselves so politely that she couldn’t respond, not from the heart. The war came into it somewhere, the part her country had played. They made it sound as if she’d had a hand in it, even though she’d spent most of the Blitz asleep under the dining-room table. It was true that the British had conquered the Germans, but they wouldn’t have done it if Mr. Roosevelt hadn’t lent money to Winston Churchill. Rose began to work out that the people around her weren’t educated; they belonged to a different class from Mirabella, the Shaefers, or that man in the dressing gown who had thumped Harold.

She was dwelling on this when someone put an arm round her and steered her from the group. Fingers twiddled with her breasts. She pulled herself free and faced a man with a patch over one eye, the other eye winking suggestively. He said it would be sweet to get to know her better. Although it was an unusually nice way of expressing a need, she refused him with firmness. Too often, out of politeness, she had got herself into difficult situations. ‘I’m so sorry,’ she told him, ‘thank you very much, but my husband would get cross.’

She was walking towards Harold when there was a loud disturbance. Hayland was swaying on a beer crate, bellowing for silence. ‘That guy,’ he yelled, pointing at someone in the darkness, ‘my buddy, has had his house burnt to the ground.’ Murmurs of commiseration rose from the guests.

Rose halted, eyes widening in joy; she was no longer alone.

They were sheltering in the porch of the church, to be out of the rain. She’d been telling him about the row there’d been on Sunday when Auntie Phyllis had come for tea. Mother had cheated at rummy, Father had hurled the playing cards across the brass tray and Auntie Phyllis had gone home crying. ‘Why,’ she asked Dr. Wheeler, ‘do people keep hurting each other?’ He said, ‘If you want a compass to guide you through life, you have to accustom yourself to looking upon the world as a penal colony. If you abide by this you’ll stop regarding disagreeable incidents, sufferings, worries and miseries as anything out of the ordinary. Indeed, you’ll realise that everything is as it should be; each of us pays the penalty of existence in our own peculiar way.’

‘I tell you,’ bawled Hayland, spitting hatred, ‘that the next time I come across a fucking nigger I’ll tear his head from his shoulders. Are you with me?’ A boom of support echoed through the trees.

Harold and the man in the baseball cap were now on either side of Rose, each gripping an elbow. ‘Bastard . . . bastard,’ Harold shouted, as they hustled her away.