‘So what brought you out here?’ Dettie was peering at Jon from the corner of her eyes, stirring her tea with its bag.
Sam was surprised they had even stopped. Katie had to plead for an hour to get something to drink, and even then Dettie only agreed to buy something from a service station if they waited to drink it at a rest stop further along the road. They were running late, she said, and had to make up time; but as Sam had held her styrofoam cup on his knee, watching it lap at the plastic lid and waiting to find somewhere to pull over, he wondered why it made any difference where they stopped—at the service station, or out on the highway?
‘What brought me out here?’ Jon looked up from untying his laces.
‘Australia,’ Dettie said. ‘Why travel all the way from England to Australia?’ She wasn’t glaring exactly, but there was a stern look to her expression that made it seem like Jon was being interrogated. And while everyone else sat at the rest-stop picnic table, she hovered, shifting weight from foot to foot, watching every car that grumbled by. ‘Why not Paris? Ireland?’ She took a small sip and held the cup firmly between both hands.
Jon slipped off his shoe. He hummed. ‘I guess the usual answer is probably the surf, isn’t it?’ he said. ‘That or the beer. That’s what the tourists say back home. Soak up the sun. Drink the beer. See the sports. Except, of course, I don’t surf, or watch cricket. Your sun has already turned me to leather. And forgive me for saying, but I don’t know what people are talking about with the beer. Your lager tastes like water.’
Jon had bought a lemon squash, along with Katie and Sam, and would periodically turn to swig the warm, fizzless drink. He lifted his foot, laying it on his opposite knee and dusting off the sole. Sam could see a hole worn into the edge of his sock, stretching the length of his big toe.
‘Of course, it is lovely here. That’s for certain,’ he said. ‘In England right now it’s winter. Cold. Grey. Who wouldn’t prefer a bit of light? But to be honest, growing up in the UK, it’s—’ He seemed to be about to say something, but exhaled instead. ‘Well, I wanted to get away. Something different. But familiar, you know? Something not so—so rigid.’
Dettie’s eyes narrowed. ‘Rigid?’ she repeated.
Katie had swiped five biscuits from the packet lying open on the picnic table, and was stacking them up on top of one another. She would take a bite from one and then move it to the bottom of the pile as she chewed, playing her own strange little tower game as she listened.
‘See, you lot don’t really have a class system here, do you?’ Jon said. ‘Do you know much about all that?’
Dettie tilted her head. It seemed she didn’t really know, but wasn’t going to admit as much.
‘In England everybody’s obsessed with class,’ he said. ‘What class are you in? Upper class? Working class? They obsess about it. This old social pecking order—real ancient stuff—stretching back to the days of the landed gentry and working serfs. It’s the kind of toffee-nosed, blue-blood, self-righteous system you would have thought they’d thrown out with powdered wigs. But no. There are people who are obsessed with it. They make sure it gets baked into everything. The schools you go to. The jobs you get. The clubs you get allowed in. Who you date. Where you live.’ He grunted. ‘Meanwhile, we have the bottle to call the French snobs.’
He fished inside his shoe, fingers scraping at something on the sole. ‘It’s exhausting,’ he said. ‘It wears you down. Makes you fed up. Makes you old before your time.’
A small stone tumbled down into the dirt. ‘This cloud hanging over you every moment of every day,’ he said. ‘Knowing that no matter what—what you do, where you go, how much you make—you’re going nowhere because some inbred wankers—’
Dettie snorted, coughing tea from her lungs.
‘Sorry,’ he said, quickly. ‘Sorry, love. Sorry. Sorry, kids. I mean, wowsers. Wowsers.’
She caught her breath, theatrically flicking drops of tea from her fingers as she shook her head. Katie was sitting up, smiling widely, trying to remember what Jon had said that got such a reaction.
‘It just gets frustrating when you see it everywhere,’ he went on. ‘Something that meaningless. Something so utterly arbitrary. All because a bunch of—’ he shot Dettie an apologetic look, ‘wowsers don’t want us poor trash getting a seat at their restaurant. Breathing all their rarefied air.’
He took another mouthful of lemon squash and swished it around his teeth. ‘It’s just nice to be over here for a little while,’ he said. ‘To be out from under all that for a spell.’
Dettie’s lips were curled, but she offered him a quick nod.
Katie went back to absently scratching two biscuits together, making a small pile of crumbs on the table. ‘So if you don’t have any money,’ she said, ‘you have to stay having no money?’
‘Sort of, sweetie. A little bit.’ Jon slipped his shoe back on and began retying his laces. ‘Only, it’s not really money, so much. It’s the way people treat you. You can get rich—people do. Actors, writers, sportspeople. But if you were born working class—even if you were born middle—anyone who thinks they’re an upper-class person will look down on you as worthless. Unworthy. You’re born in your box, you’ll stay in your box.’
‘That sounds horrible,’ Katie said.
‘We’re England, sweetie. I suspect we invented horrible.’
Dettie sighed, rolling her eyes. ‘Well, yes, I’m sure there are some who abuse their place,’ she said. ‘But it’s hardly all bad. There is refinement, isn’t there? Breeding and civility. And there’s something to be said for aristocracy. For having people to look up to.’
Jon slumped back against the table. Over on the highway a couple of cars fizzed by. He gave a grim smile and shrugged.
Katie stared over at Dettie like she had just spoken a foreign language. ‘What?’ she said.
‘Kings and queens, dear. A whole history—a living history—reaching back to the very birth of the country itself.’ Dettie was peering off into the distance, out at the baked brown undulations of the horizon. ‘It’s all very romantic.’
Jon stood up, rolling his shoulders. ‘But it’s all just an idea, love,’ he said. He stretched his back and started pacing, very slowly, in place. ‘Some mad nonsense someone dreamt up back in the Dark Ages. Royal bloodlines. Heraldry. Family crests. All just excuses for one group of posh tossbags to push everyone else around. To say get off my land, don’t touch my stuff.’
Sam had gotten used to watching Jon’s hands when he talked, and even though he wasn’t signing anything, his gestures showed he was getting agitated. They sliced at the air. His fingers were stiff. Even his elbows seemed locked tight.
‘And they learn it so young,’ he was saying. ‘I was a white-van man for a while. My dad, he was a white-van man, after he finished up at the mechanics. Do a bit of handiwork. Fix your car. Make you a shelf. Build you a rabbit hutch. That sort of thing. If you could see the way these toffs look through you. Even their little prep-school kids. Like you’re not even there. It turns your blood cold.’
Dettie stared down into her cup. The tea had already cooled. She was actually nodding, but Sam noticed the deliberate, delicate way she was holding it by the rim, her pinkies very slightly raised.
‘Still,’ she said, ‘I think there’s something to be said for breeding.’ The string of her tea bag hung matted in a stain of dried milk on the side of her cup. ‘Wish we had a little more of it in this country. Civility.’ That last word she seemed to want to hold on to as she spoke it, stretching it out. Sam thought of Roger. Dettie’s insistence on those ‘cultural differences’ Roger and his mother had supposedly faced. How ‘unfamiliar’ he apparently was.
Jon sighed. ‘Oh no. No, don’t wish for civility, love. You don’t know how good you’ve got it here. You lot are young. You’re not stiff and decayed like us.’ He looked out at that same horizon Dettie was peering into and clearly saw something else. ‘The way I figure it,’ he said, ‘two hundred years ago we packed up all the interesting people and sent them out here. And the best thing you lot did—the best thing—was toss all that lords and gentry nonsense in the bin.’ He yanked the waist of his pants. ‘Still got Her Majesty’s head on your coins,’ he said. ‘Looking a might younger than in reality, I’ll add—but otherwise you’ve gotten on with it.’
Dettie’s face was drawn. She set aside her drink and dusted imaginary crumbs from her lap. She seemed to be auditioning to be one of those ladies Jon had just banished from history.
‘Besides,’ Jon said, turning and waving at the makeshift picnic strewn across the table, ‘wouldn’t you rather sit here with us? Enjoy this sunset? Eat a few Jammie Dodgers? Sip from a styrofoam cup? Rather than nibble half a cucumber sandwich with some sorry Jane Austen rejects? Living your whole life propped up on the reputation of dead people you never knew?’
She blinked, slowly, staring at the ground. ‘If there’s one thing the world could use more of,’ she said, ‘it’s good manners.’
He smiled. ‘Well, I can say jolly good and pip pip occasionally, if it’ll make you feel better, love.’ He caught her eye and held it, raising his eyebrows. ‘M’lady?’ he said, and faked a bow.
Dettie’s expression softened and she smiled too.
‘Cucumber sandwiches are gross,’ Katie said.
‘Exactly,’ Jon said, and laughed.
And to Sam’s surprise, Dettie and Katie laughed too.