Celia and Lily were half-sisters, but since both their fathers had long ago withdrawn, they were united by their one parent in common, their mother, Fay. Fay took them along with her – to France, South America – wherever she had a new marriage or liaison. Celia, who was ten years older than Lily, returned to New York as soon as she could. Educating herself through a series of semi-professional courses, she set up as a psychotherapist and became quite successful, while waiting for Lily to be old enough to join her.
Lily was sent to boarding school in Switzerland, where she was miserable. Celia advised patience; she knew Lily would be miserable anywhere except with herself. As soon as she had failed her last exam, Celia made arrangements for her to take art classes in New York, though she wasn’t really surprised when Lily dropped out within a month. After that, Lily spent her days wandering around the streets carrying her sketching pad. This remained blank, but perhaps for the first time in her life Lily appeared to be entirely happy, living with her sister in their apartment in an Art Deco building on the East Side.
Celia was still there – immensely old, the only one left. Even Scipio was gone (killed when his racing car overturned at São Paulo), although his name remained as sole heir in Celia’s will. Nowadays, all Celia could do was keep herself slightly mobile. When she managed to get up, she somehow dressed herself, usually askew, and shuffled off to the soup and salad place at the corner. Here she was served the same bowl of soup every day, which was all she seemed to need for nourishment. What was there left to nourish? The present was extinct for her; the past had vanished with all the people in it, even the dearest of them.
When Lily, at nineteen, had decided to get married, it had been unexpected: a shock. She simply produced Gavin, didn’t even introduce him, murmured his name so softly that Celia failed to hear it and he had to say it himself, louder. Celia couldn’t find out where and how they had met. ‘I picked her up on the street,’ Gavin said. He warned Celia: ‘I’ve been telling her she really ought to be more careful about strangers.’ He said it tongue-in-cheek, a joke, but afterwards, when she and Lily were alone, Celia was serious about the dangers of the street. Lily said mildly, ‘I don’t talk to many people and hardly anyone talks to me.’ Celia believed her; there was something remote about Lily that would discourage strangers from addressing her.
Gavin’s family liked and accepted her immediately. Gavin was a poet, and it seemed right for him to unite himself with his muse. Lily was fair to the point of evanescence, delicate, almost diaphanous – it was easy to think of her as a muse. She loved Gavin, everything about him. ‘Why?’ he would ask, amused, but she couldn’t answer; she had no gift for words. She was an artist by temperament more than practice. She liked to trace Gavin’s features – not with a pencil or brush but with her finger, lightly feeling him. This also made him laugh, but he kept still for her.
He came from a large old American family, and the wedding was quite grand. It was held in the Hudson Valley mansion where Gavin’s mother Elizabeth still lived with two old uncles. China Trade dinner services were taken out of cabinets where they had been shut up so long that they had to be soaked in tubs of water to wash the dust off. Faded tapestries were hung over wallpaper that was even more faded. But it was summer and the grounds were lush, the ancient trees loaded with foliage that looked too heavy for their broken limbs to carry. A fountain spouted rusty water out of the mouths of crumbling lions. There was a band and some of the guests danced, even some very old ones in very old long dresses that got wet in the grass.
The original idea had been for the newly wed couple to live in the house with the groom’s mother. Gavin was the youngest of Elizabeth’s five children and the only son; his sisters were all married with children, but he was over thirty and had not been expected to marry. Elizabeth prepared one of the bedrooms for him and Lily – it had been unoccupied for years, but all that was needed was to renew the curtains and the canopy over the four-poster. Elizabeth picked flowers and filled several vases so that youth and freshness permeated the ancient room, which held a harp and watercolours of mountain streams and a broken-down castle in the Catskills. It was enchanting, and at first Lily and Gavin were enchanted. It seemed so perfect for them, for him who wrote poetry and her who painted.
It turned out that both of them preferred the city. Lily saw plenty of sky from the terrace of Celia’s apartment, and birds, and buildings as fantastic as trees and more ornate; this was as much landscape as she needed. Gavin had spent his childhood in the country, but after he went to boarding school, he didn’t look forward to going home; school was far more exciting to him (he made deep friendships) and even during vacations he preferred to take up invitations from friends whose parents lived on Park Avenue and had season tickets to the opera.
Six months into their marriage, Gavin and Lily were mostly with Celia in the city. At least Lily was – Gavin spent much of his time elsewhere, with friends in their studios and their weekend houses on Fire Island or the Cape. It didn’t occur to him to take his wife with him on these visits; she too appeared to think it natural that she should be mostly alone or with her sister. Marriage for her meant waiting for Gavin and being very happy when he was there. And because Lily was happy, Celia too complied with the situation, at least to the extent of not commenting on it.
Then their mother Fay showed up. She did this every now and again, whenever a liaison broke down or she had to see her lawyer about increasing her remittances. She was bored easily, loved to travel, loved to meet new people. She was very skinny and very lively and dressed with tasteful flamboyance, wound around with Parisian scarves and Italian costume jewellery; her hair was a metallic red, cut like a boy’s.
It was the first time she had visited her daughters since Lily’s marriage. She had been living in Paris just then and was unable to attend the wedding because of undergoing an unspecified procedure. All she told them about it now was: ‘You don’t want to know all that . . . But guess what: I’m a widow.’ They didn’t understand which husband she had lost, till she revealed that it was Celia’s father. They hadn’t heard her refer to him as anything but ‘that loser’, but now she became sentimental, remembered early days – ‘Fay and Harry! Crazy kids!’ – and then felt sorry for Celia, for being fatherless, orphaned. ‘You’re still here,’ Celia pointed out, which irritated her mother; those two never could be together for long without irritation.
Now they had to live together, for although Fay felt most at home in hotels, she couldn’t for the moment afford to move into one. Celia’s apartment was large – the same one in which she remained for the rest of her life – but, with Fay there, it was no longer large enough. Fay suggested that the front part, Celia’s office where she saw patients, could be made into a charming bed-sitting room for herself. ‘You don’t see your crazies all day,’ she argued, promising to make herself scarce during office hours. Failing that, she felt it to be appropriate to move into the bedroom now given over to Gavin and Lily. ‘They should have a place of their own,’ she said. ‘It’s working class for a young married couple to be living with their families.’
‘They’re looking,’ Celia lied. But they weren’t, and she even suspected that Gavin had kept his old apartment and continued to live there the way he had done before his marriage.
Lily agreed that it was a waste for the married couple to have the larger bedroom when she herself was mostly alone in it. One morning, while Celia was busy with her patients, Lily helped Fay carry her load of possessions into the room she willingly vacated. Even Gavin, arriving from one of his excursions, didn’t seem to mind that his clothes were now scattered over various closets. Also, since their new room was too small for two of them, he made himself comfortable on the living room sofa. He kept the light on all night to read, while playing records very softly so as not to disturb anyone. He was always considerate, more like a house-guest than a husband.
The second Sunday after Fay’s arrival was the day they drove her to meet Gavin’s family in the country. A traditional Anglo-Saxon lunch of roast lamb had been cooked by Elizabeth, Gavin’s mother. Her kitchen still had its old appliances, which had become antiques, but Elizabeth coped very efficiently, even providing a special dish for Lily, who was vegetarian. The cavernous dining-room had been opened up, and as far as possible the dust wiped out of the convoluted furniture. Only its smell remained pervading the air. There was no smell of food, since the family usually ate in the kitchen.
In outward appearance and manner, this family now seated around the table was also more or less traditional. Besides Elizabeth, who sat at the head, there were two uncles, her brothers-in-law who lived in the house with her; both wore three-piece suits, their waistcoats and bow ties slightly spotted with food. The visiting guests were three of Gavin’s sisters, two of them with husbands and some children, and a few relatives introduced as cousins. All spoke in the same loud voices, guttural with good breeding and unchallenged opinions. The conversation consisted mostly of amusing family anecdotes recounted by the two uncles. At the punchline, each uncle rapped the table and coughed with laughter, which made tears rise to their sorrowful, faded eyes. Elizabeth too laughed as at something she had never heard before; and she looked around at her guests to make sure they absorbed this family history, which it would one day be their turn to pass on.
At the end of the meal, when the sisters and cousins had driven off to visit other relatives embedded in the neighbourhood, Elizabeth invited Fay on a house tour. Several rooms had to be kept shut up because of the cost of heating and the lack of domestic staff, and here the furniture – New York State and valuable – was shrouded to protect it against bat droppings. The paintings and the statuary testified mostly to the taste of the ancestors, whose portraits hung all around the house they had built and rebuilt. They featured the same type of men and women through the generations, the original tall, bony merchants and farmers – they operated gravel pits and flour mills – still visible in the later portraits of New York clubmen living on trust funds.
These portraits were the only part of the house tour of any interest to Fay. While hardly listening to Elizabeth’s detailed biographies, she stepped close to examine them; but none of them in the least resembled fair, slender Gavin. At last she asked Elizabeth, ‘I suppose he takes after your family?’ But no – Elizabeth’s family, professional people from an adjoining county, were mostly, like herself, short and sturdy. Gavin was the first to look like – well, what he was: a poet.
As they crossed an upper landing, they saw him on the stairs; he was arguing with Celia, who called to them, ‘Gavin says he’s going back to New York!’ They walked up together to join their two mothers on the landing. Celia was angry; she said, ‘He has to meet some writer from Poland.’
‘Fixed up weeks ago,’ he regretted. ‘Just the sort of stupid thing I do. It’s not even a writer, it’s a critic. But I’m not going to spoil your fun. I know Mother has a whole programme for you this afternoon. The Shaker Museum; the old almshouses. It’s just my bad luck . . . Don’t look at me like that, Celia, as if you’re seeing right through me. You scare me.’
‘I wish I did. Maybe then you’d be nicer to Lily.’
‘Oh my Lord! Ask Lily who, who could be nicer to her than I?’ He pecked her cheek as though grateful to her for her compliance, and she watched him, lithe in his linen suit, run lightly down the stairs.
Later, Fay and Celia were standing by the window in the bedroom allotted to them. It was a bright gold afternoon, but they looked only at the figure sitting on an ornamental bench under the largest maple, which was still magnificent though half-destroyed by storms.
‘She’s sketching,’ Celia said.
‘Have you ever actually seen . . . ?’
‘Gavin says she has talent.’
Lily was sitting very still. Perhaps she was taking in the scene to interpret it later. She could often be observed sitting this way, gazing in front of her, her hands folded on the sketchbook in her lap: maybe watching, maybe waiting, definitely patient.
Fay turned away impatiently. ‘I couldn’t bear to stay the night in this creepy room. No doubt they all died in that bed. Let’s go: I don’t need to be entertained any more. And surely the Shaker Museum is a joke.’
‘No. And neither are the almshouses.’
‘You just love to torment me, Celia, you’ve always loved to do that.’
But she wasn’t serious – she was relieved to have Celia with her. Although so different in every way, she and her daughter were both out of their element here. Unlike Gavin’s ancestors, theirs hadn’t tilled this land nor built their houses on it. Their great-grandmothers and grandmothers had long since looked to Europe for their sustenance; this was evident in both Fay and Celia, in the cast of their thoughts as well as in their chic appearance.
Only Lily was a throwback to earlier, simpler, simply American girls. She came in, as so often barefoot, her white-blonde hair wind-blown; she was holding a branch with a few leaves on it. She said at once: ‘Where’s Gavin?’
‘Doesn’t he tell you anything?’ Fay said, and Celia, eyebrows raised: ‘The Polish critic?’
‘I’m really stupid,’ Lily said. ‘I forget everything. Look, there’s Elizabeth. She’s pruning a rosebush. She’s always busy; she does a million things. Can’t you see her? I wish you’d wear your glasses, Mummy.’
‘I don’t need them. I don’t need to see anything more. I did a house tour; I sat through an entire lunch. I’m starting a headache and I want to go back to New York.’
Lily didn’t look at her but trailed the branch she was holding across the faded flower pattern of the carpet. She said, ‘It wouldn’t be fair to Elizabeth. If we left. It wouldn’t even be polite. It would really be very rude. I mean, if it were me, I’d think these were really very rude people.’ Still intent on her branch, she missed the look of wry resignation that passed between her mother and her sister.
Lily became pregnant. At first she said her stomach was upset, and as for her periods, they were always irregular. When Celia wanted to take her to a doctor, she didn’t want to go because doctors always discovered something horrible. ‘But supposing it’s not horrible,’ Celia said. ‘Supposing it’s something you’d like, you and Gavin?’
‘Oh, you think it might be a baby? Well, why not. I am married.’ She looked at her sister out of those very candid, fairy-tale eyes that made people love and trust her.
On being informed: ‘Is it possible?’ Fay asked Celia.
‘Of course it is,’ Celia said. ‘You hear about it all the time. I have friends you’d never think – and then suddenly they spring a grown-up son or daughter on you, visiting them over Christmas.’
Fay also had such friends with unsuspected offspring. But still she said, ‘I can’t imagine.’
‘Can’t imagine what?’ Celia said, the more irritably because she also couldn’t imagine: not about Gavin and, if it came to that, not about Lily herself. But there she was, pregnant, an indubitable fact.
Gavin’s mother Elizabeth had no doubts at all. She came travelling up to the city and took Lily to her own gynaecologist, who confirmed that everything was fine, and also that the scan showed a boy. Elizabeth was delighted – another grandchild, and this time the son of her only son. She advised plenty of exercise for Lily, plenty of walking, plenty of good food and fresh air.
Lily did plenty of walking but the air she was taking in was not altogether fresh. It was what she liked best in the world – street smells, petrol fumes, leaking gas pipes, newly poured tar, pretzels, mangoes from Mexico, Chinese noodles, overblown flowers – the exhalations of the city, the densely populated streets that she traversed from one end to the other, walking lightly on sandals so flimsy her feet might have been bare and treading on grass. On warm days she wore a very light summer frock – no more than a shift – that blew with any breeze wafting up from the subway or from leaky steam pipes. She avoided parks and other open spaces unless they were from a building recently demolished; and if she sat for a moment to rest, it was on the steps of a Masonic temple or a storefront, from which she was sometimes chased away. When it rained, she sheltered under an overbridge, though she liked to get wet – very wet, with the drops trickling from her hair down her face so that she flicked out her tongue to taste them and refresh herself. She stopped occasionally to sniff the flowers arranged in the front of a grocery store. On raising her eyes to the sky, she was perfectly satisfied that all she could see of it was a bright patch inserted among tall towers. If it was night – for she wandered around for many hours – there was sometimes a slice of moon and helicopters flitting and glittering around like fireflies.
Celia summoned Gavin to her office. ‘I hate it,’ she told him. ‘The way she walks around everywhere by herself and at all hours. It’s not safe. She’s not safe.’
‘Lily?’ He was gentle and smiling, patient as no patient of hers ever was. ‘But Lily is always safe. Don’t you feel that about her – that nothing could happen to her?’
‘Maybe it’s happened already.’ She was trembling a bit – at what she was saying, the danger to Lily, but also at his calm, the way he sat there, cross-legged and slightly swinging one foot in its narrow shoe. She said, ‘You know how innocent she is, how trusting.’
‘Yes.’ He smiled in recognition of these qualities in his wife, and he assured Celia, ‘I love and adore her as you do.’
‘I’m her sister. I love and adore her in a different way. All I’m asking is that you should stop her from wandering around the streets. Or help me stop her. Please be home tonight so that we can talk to her together.’
‘Yes, we should – but unfortunately, tonight, what a pity.’
‘Tomorrow, then?’
‘Oh absolutely,’ he promised. ‘Definitely tomorrow.’
But it was on that same day that he met Lily to report on his talk with her sister. They met where they usually did, in a church in midtown. It was the place where they had first seen each other, amid a sea of empty pews with here and there a few bowed figures, some come to pray, others only to fall asleep for want of food or a home to go to. Everyone was alone, maybe lonely and certainly in deep need. If Gavin and Lily were in such need, it was at least partly satisfied that time when they first met each other.
On the day of Gavin’s talk with Celia, they did not go in but sat on the steps of the church. He ran down for a moment to buy them two pretzels from a cart, and a drink to share. They picnicked there on the bank of a river of traffic, rushing and foaming in the street below. They sat close together at the side, undisturbed by people walking past them. Gavin informed her of everything that Celia had said to him and the way she had said it; he concluded, ‘She thinks you may have been . . . attacked? By someone. In the street?’
‘No. No.’
‘Then what happened? If you want to tell me, that is.’
She did – and it was relatively easy sitting so close and he listening with the sympathy and selfless love that he always showed her. ‘It was raining,’ she said. He nodded; he understood that she was sheltering somewhere. ‘Yes, under the 59th Street bridge. The rain was coming down really hard and I only had this –’ she indicated her diaphanous dress – ‘I didn’t want to stay there because you know what it’s like under a bridge that people who don’t have anywhere else use for their, you know, their toilet, and also to store whatever they have, from the trash or whatever. No one spoke to anyone, like they don’t in church, because of having so much else to think about? Different things. Except there was one person, maybe he didn’t have too many worries to consider, I mean he was maybe too young to have them.’
‘How young?’
‘Seventeen. He told me he’d come from – I’ve forgotten – some African country. He’d come here to start a restaurant. That was his dream. He was looking for a job to be a waiter where he could save enough money to open his own restaurant with the special food from his African country. He was very, very hopeful that it would happen. I was the first girl he met to talk to since he’d come here. He did what you always do – touched my hair and then let it sort of run through his fingers. He was very sweet, gentle also, till he got excited. He got like . . . frantic? No, I wasn’t scared; I understood he got that way because he hadn’t met any girl here, so it was my fault really, in a way. And afterwards he was very nice again and said he wished he had something to give me to keep for myself. I didn’t have anything either, so I told him I’d come back next day and bring him something.’
‘And did you?’ Gavin asked, playing with her hair the way she said the boy under the bridge had done.
After a moment she admitted it. And after another moment: ‘I thought: maybe he’ll never have the restaurant, maybe not even a job in one, nothing that he expects will happen, ever happen, such a lot of disappointment . . . I gave him a silver chain Fay had brought me from Peru. I’d never liked wearing it, it was so heavy, like being put in irons. But he was glad to have it and to see me again. I think he thought I wouldn’t come back.’
‘But you did.’
She hung her head but raised it again before answering frankly: ‘That time we didn’t stay under the bridge. We walked to the park; it wasn’t raining that day but the ground was wet. It was chilly but much nicer than under the bridge. This was the day before you and I drove to the country with Fay and Celia, and all the time we were there, I kept thinking how he didn’t have a sweater or anything, and what if he caught a cold and had nowhere to sleep except under the 59th Street bridge? So when we got back to New York, I went there with a blanket and a sweater, but he’d gone. And I keep hoping he went off to a job as a waiter in a restaurant but also I think – what if he got ill being out in the open? And it turned into pneumonia and he was taken to a hospital where they take poor people?’
‘Boys of seventeen don’t catch pneumonia,’ Gavin affirmed clearly. ‘He’s working as a waiter and saving money for a restaurant. You have to believe me. I don’t want you to worry in any way or have disturbing thoughts, because that’s bad for our baby. OK? Promise. Only nice thoughts.’
‘About you.’
‘About me, if that’s what you want.’ He took her hand and kissed it.
Next day he took her to the country to stay with his mother. Lily liked to sleep late, and in the mornings, when Elizabeth herself had already been up for many hours and completed many tasks, she sat beside her frail daughter-in-law and the precious unborn child where they lay in a deceased great-aunt’s great bed. Elizabeth was nearing seventy, strong and stocky, with apple cheeks and bright blue eyes. Although her connection with the family was only through marriage, she was an expert on each degree of their convoluted relationships and of their convoluted stories. These stories, which she was passing on to her pregnant daughter-in-law, were mostly of domestic or social interest. No one had held high office or distinguished themselves in any wars. But they had involved themselves in local politics, built additions to the house, engaged in lawsuits with neighbours about boundary lines. There had been some scandals: divorces as long ago as the beginning of the century, also the stigma of gambling debts, and more than one case of temporary confinement in a mental institution. But mostly they had led long and uneventful lives, with several of them celebrating their hundredth birthday. They had done some travelling – honeymoons and study tours in Italy, safari in Africa – but they had all spent their last years at home and with each other. In the end family loyalties triumphed over everything, even property disputes between brothers and sisters.
Elizabeth encouraged Lily to walk around the grounds. It was the end of what had been a very wet summer, and the estate had become a wilderness of tall grass with trees sweeping down into it. The trees themselves had survived their centuries with hollowed trunks; some of them had split apart and had been kept from falling by iron chains that had grown rusty and appeared to be part of the trunks they were meant to hold. Besides age, storms had ransacked the land, and every winter one of the great trees – copper beech or red maple – had given way and crashed to the ground, to be cut up into firewood to feed the giant fireplaces inside the house and warm the chill bones of its inhabitants.
Although Lily traversed city streets in complete confidence, here she tramped through the grass with misgiving of what might be lurking there – poison ivy, or a snake she knew would not be harmless to herself. Passing two blighted apple trees – the remains of what had once been an orchard cultivated for profit – she picked up one of the apples that lay half-hidden in the grass; soft and rotten, it split apart in her hand and maggots crawled out of it. She miserably counted the minutes until she could say she had had enough fresh air and return to the house to be near the telephone on which Gavin called her regularly, at the same time every day.
Celia, also calling every day, asked her, ‘When are you coming home?’ Lily was evasive – for Celia, this was something completely new in her. Lily said she needed the home-cooked meals Gavin’s mother provided instead of the gourmet takeout Celia usually sent for. ‘I thought you liked it,’ Celia said, and Lily replied yes she did, when she had only herself to think of.
Celia told Fay: ‘She’s lying to us. They’re both lying to us.’
‘What if they’re not?’
‘I’ll find out. We’ll go there this weekend. She’ll tell me the truth. She always does. Don’t you want to know the truth?’
‘Not always,’ Fay said. ‘Will Gavin be there with her, do you think?’
‘Is Gavin ever with her,’ Celia said in exasperation.
Suddenly Fay said with more energy than she usually produced, ‘Whatever’s happened has happened. So let it rest, Celia.’
But, ‘No,’ Celia said. ‘No.’
On the weekend, challenged about her husband’s absence, Lily remained calm. ‘He’s trying to get away, but there’s always something.’ Her shy-violet eyes were large and solemn with truthfulness. ‘Gavin knows a lot of interesting people. Everyone wants to meet him.’ She sounded as proud and pleased as Gavin did when he spoke of her. ‘He’s so wonderful – different from everyone in the world. More wonderful,’ she explained.
Celia said, ‘That’s what I’m saying: he is different; all right, more wonderful, if that’s how you want it . . . You don’t have to go through with this,’ she continued. ‘It’s a very easy thing to do nowadays, almost legal, certainly with someone as small as you . . . ’ She tried to span her hands round Lily’s waist not only to demonstrate its smallness but to touch her in affection.
Lily disengaged herself. She said, ‘If you don’t believe me, you don’t love me. People don’t love people they think are liars.’
She went out and took the only action she knew – she called Gavin, and from her voice he realized he could not delay any longer. He told her he would be there on Sunday morning and, confident that he would, she got up early and accompanied her mother-in-law to church.
So when Gavin drove up to the house, he met only Fay, unsuccessfully trying to make coffee for herself in the stone-age kitchen. He did it for her, and she thanked him, and then she said she was glad he had come, to help intervene in the situation that had arisen between her two daughters. The difficulty was, she told him frankly, that Celia couldn’t stand the competition, always having had Lily completely to herself.
‘And now you’re here,’ he said.
‘Not for long. I’m going away. But you’re not. And the baby is not, I presume.’
‘Yes, he and I are here to stay.’
‘Isn’t it exciting? I’m excited.’ She stroked his arm, lingering over the sleeve of his summer jacket; she had always appreciated good-looking men. She said, ‘It was so kind of you to have married my little Lily.’
‘No no, not at all; quite the contrary. It’s Lily who is kind. Mother adores her. For her sweet temperament,’ he explained, ‘and for being so much part of the family. I hope when they’ve finished praying together, Mother will show her around the churchyard. It’s full of us, going back two hundred years. Of course there’ve been ups and downs – two hundred years is no joke! – but that’s how it goes. Kingdoms like the orchard flit russetly away, and all the rest of it.’
‘But the name is still there,’ Fay said. ‘And you’re carrying it on. You and my Lily. That’s so mysterious and lovely.’ She pressed his shoulder, massaging it a bit in affection.
The Sunday lunch Elizabeth served on her return was the same Fay and Celia remembered from their previous visit. So were the family anecdotes told around the table, and they seemed endless to Celia, leaving her tense with frustration. But afterwards she managed to manoeuvre herself and Fay to be alone with their hostess in the parlour. Elizabeth was embroidering a little muslin shirt, and she explained that the pattern – of birds, daisies, violets – was copied from a framed sampler with a faded signature and the date 1871. Beside it hung some watercolours of local scenes – a waterfall, a horse and cart in a field – painted years ago but still there, Elizabeth said, to be rendered by anyone with artistic talent. She herself had no such talent – which made her all the more thankful to have Lily in the family. Fay confirmed that Lily had always loved sketching and had gone to art school.
‘She lasted a week,’ Celia said. ‘Lily is really too frail – physically and otherwise – to see anything through. That’s why we’re worried about her present condition: if she’s strong enough to carry it full term.’
‘Our Dr Williams said everything was perfectly normal,’ Elizabeth said with satisfaction.
‘Perfectly normal,’ Celia repeated. She threw a swift glance at her mother, but despairing of help from there, rushed in on her own to tell Gavin’s mother: ‘We hardly see him. We have no idea where he is, with whom. All we know is he’s not where he should be. At home, Lily never knew if her husband was on the sofa where he had chosen to sleep, or if he’d been out all night.’
Snipping off a thread, Elizabeth smiled in reply. ‘Gavin has always been a nightbird. I suppose poets usually are, that’s when they get their inspiration. Luckily dear Lily is an artist herself, she understands him perfectly. A perfectly matched couple.’ She smiled again.
‘A poet and his muse.’ Fay smiled back.
Two slender figures in light clothes, Gavin and Lily wandered among trees and bushes in the grounds. When he lifted a branch to let her slip through, they appeared to vanish – tenuous as shadows, insubstantial. But for each other they were substantially there. They hardly touched; only sometimes he held her hand, or guided her by her elbow. The grounds were different for Lily when he was there. Now she saw that here and there the ancient and broken trees had sprouted new branches with leaves on them. He led her to where there was a fishpond with water lilies unfolded and goldfish swimming beneath them. They sat on a pile of stones forming a bank, and he lightly laid his arm across her shoulders while she traced his features with her finger, in silence and contentment.
It did not last very long; he looked at his watch. He had to go back to the city, an appointment.
She said, ‘Let me come with you.’
He smiled and kissed her hair. ‘Mother so loves having you here, and she can look after you better and cook you all those dishes. I know you don’t like them, neither do I, but you need them. The baby needs them.’
‘And afterwards? Do we have to live with Celia? Can’t I come live with you?’
From his sad smile she realized how impossible this was. She knew he had a place where he needed to do things of his own, write his poetry and meet poets and other friends.
‘Celia lives near the park. You can take the baby there.’
‘I don’t like the park.’
‘Then walk in the street with the pram – I’ll meet you every day and I’ll push the pram. I’ll love to do that.’
‘Really?’ She laughed out loud with pleasure.
‘Oh yes. Yes. It’ll be fun. Our own baby . . . I’m so much looking forward to it. We all are. Mother can hardly wait.’
They were silent. After a while he said, ‘Mother will stay with you while he’s being born. She did it for all my sisters. She’ll be the first to see him.’
A leaf dropped from an overhanging tree; a frog croaked. Gavin said, ‘Tell me about him again.’
She waved her hand before her face as though waving away something she did not want to see; but on the contrary, it was a gesture of conjuring up a vision that was imprinted on her mind. ‘He was small, very small and skinny. Like those pictures you see of children starving in Africa? Only it was the way he was built, he wasn’t exactly starving, though he was hungry. I could tell from the way he ate my pretzel and then asked for another and two hot dogs. It may be because teenagers can never get enough to eat. His hair was very curly and it sat on him like a cap, and his ears stuck out from his head like two handles. His eyes were the biggest thing about him, they were huge, huge, and they shone in the rest of his face – I mean his face being so dark and it was also dark under the bridge.’
‘Yes,’ Gavin said. ‘I think I can see him. In fact, quite clearly.’
‘I see him all the time and I’m scared.’
‘Why should you be? I’m here. It’s my son.’
‘Scared that he may have gotten sick from being in the rain and having nowhere to dry his shirt. I don’t think he had another one, and it was very thin cloth so you could see his shoulder blades sticking out.’
‘I thought you trusted me,’ Gavin said, sounding so sad that she gave a little cry of reassurance and for a brief moment laid her hand on the shoulder of his jacket.
‘If you trust me, you have to believe me.’
‘I do believe you, and last week I went around to all the Ethiopian restaurants I could find in New York, but he wasn’t there. But maybe he wasn’t Ethiopian.’
‘No, maybe he was Nigerian, but you wouldn’t want to go around to all the Nigerian restaurants. He’s working and saving his tips for the restaurant. You have to believe me without proof. That’s what faith is – believing without proof.’
They got up from the bank of stones. It was getting late, the shadows lay cool and lengthened on the grass and the tops of the trees had the stillness around them that means the end of the day and its liquidation in the setting sun. They retraced their steps back to the house where his car was parked, and when they passed through the blighted orchard, he picked up an apple for her and she ate it. She didn’t even have to look; she knew it would be whole, without worms or decay.
Nevertheless, some of the things he had promised her did not happen. The baby was born and, as Gavin had predicted, Elizabeth was the first to see him emerge with his little cap of black hair. Gavin chose the name Scipio for him (after the Roman general Scipio Africanus, he explained to Lily). But Lily did not often push Scipio in his pram. Instead she pushed Gavin in his wheelchair through the streets they both loved. Poets traditionally die young – in the past often from consumption, but Gavin was an early victim of a new disease. He had been moved to Celia’s apartment and stayed in the bedroom that he now shared with Lily, he alone in the bed and she on a folding cot placed at the foot of it. She cared for him entirely by herself, refusing to engage a nurse and only sometimes grudgingly accepting Celia’s help. It was easy for her to carry him; he had become as light as a child, and he looked up at her with perfect trust in her ability to hold him.
A week after he died, she climbed up to the roof of an office building that Gavin had pointed out to her as a typical example of post-war commercial architecture. He had told her it was architecturally very boring, but it suited her purpose after she discovered that the fire escape stairway leading to the roof was kept open during office hours. So it was by day that she took the long climb to arrive at the top. From here she gazed down over the city: the churches and the bridges and the ribbons of river, and the streets with their shoals of cars and glittering towers of museums and stores and theatres and restaurants and dreams of restaurants – dreams of glory and gold pouring down from the sky that, now she was so close to it, turned out to be much larger and brighter than she had anticipated.
While he was growing up, the orphaned Scipio mostly lived in the country in the family house permeated by the family history that his paternal grandmother transmitted to him day by day. He didn’t listen to her stories very carefully; at this time his principal interest was in horses and he often accompanied his two great-uncles to the races at Saratoga. His ambition was to become a jockey, for which he was small and wiry enough, and even slightly bow-legged. But after spending a vacation with his grandmother Fay in Monte Carlo, where she had settled for tax reasons, he grew enthusiastic about motorcar racing. This led to his subsequent career as a racing-car driver. He became famous and was photographed for magazines, leaning against his car with his crash helmet under his arm, his radiant smile stretching up to his ears where they stuck out like two handles.
This photograph, and many others of him, stood in Celia’s living-room. She looked at him with pleasure, but as the years passed she began to be puzzled by these pictures of Scipio. She wondered what he was doing there among all the others, especially next to the photograph of Gavin and Lily on their wedding day. But after some more time she also couldn’t remember who this couple was – she wiped the dust off the glass, but failed to make them or her memory any clearer. No one heard her mutter to herself; if she muttered some names, she had no faces to put to them, even though they were smiling all around her. There was a film over her eyes, and a film over her mind. Only sometimes there was a glimmer – a shimmer of two figures in light-coloured clothes on the verge of disappearing from sight, between trees or around a street corner, or simply fading into the ether. The ether! Even that – a poetic idea but a false hypothesis – has ceased to exist.