The Colonnel’s Daughter

Autumn in Florida

‘Special security passes,’ said the travel agent to George, ‘are needed for anyone staying at Palmetto Village. I shall require a passport-sized photograph of both you and your wife. These will be forwarded to Palmetto, together with your reservation documents, photostats of the first five pages of your passports – to include, of course, your US visa – and a signed statement by a professional person – doctor, solicitor or JP, say, – vouching both for the likeness of the photographs and for your suitability as a Palmetto resident.’

It was July in Ipswich and stifling in the travel agent’s stuffy premises. George loosened his tie and prepared to comment that this seemed like a lot of unnecessary fuss and paraphernalia and red tape and smacked, furthermore, of the CIA, but sighed instead and nodded and thought, the central purpose of this holiday is recovery – recovery from mediocrity, recovery from my everyday self – so I must make absolutely certain that all the arrangements go smoothly and that nothing upsets me. ‘Fine,’ he snapped.

While the travel agent’s fingers began a repetitive waltz with his Compu-108, George picked up the Palmetto brochure. He’d owned an identical one since January and knew the pictures in it by heart: palm-fringed pale and empty beach, palm-fringed yachts jostling for space at a clean and sparkling marina, palm-fringed 18-hole golf course, ‘exclusive to Palmetto residents’, palm-fringed riverside nightclub hung with orange mandarin lamps, palm-fringed Palmetto Village itself, clusters of pale pink Mexican-style apartments, white umbrellas on rooves and balconies, oleander and hibiscus and Cana lilies framing the buildings not only with bright pink and orange, but also, in George’s mind, with certainty. This was no mock-up, no deception: this was the tropical land limb where presidents sipped at brief idleness. While the driving October rains brought down the oak leaves and flooded the Suffolk ditches, here would George be, renewing himself.

George’s wife, Beryl, had said at Christmas, it’s been a bad year. What you mean, offered George, is you haven’t got used to Jennifer being married and not here any more. No, said Beryl, I haven’t, but it’s not only that.

George understood. He sat in his office at the Wakelin All Saints branch of the Mercantile and General Bank, sipped the weak coffee he had taught his secretary to make and decided, Beryl knows I’ve been passed over. There’s no fooling Beryl. She’s heard me murmur about the managership and even though I haven’t told her they’ll bring a younger man in, she knows they will, a younger man from Head Office probably, cutting his razor-sharp teeth on the Wakelin All Saints branch.

The Wakelin All Saints branch of the Mercantile and General Bank occupied a low, Tudor building that had once been two workers’ cottages. Rescued from years of decay in the sixties by a hairdresser called Maurice, they had given brief but unlikely houseroom to backwash basins, driers, mirror tables, infra-red lamps and black imitation leather chairs. But Wakelin All Saints was, as Maurice was forced eventually to point out, ‘a far cry from Upper Brook Street’. His dream of combining his hairdressing skill with his yearning for silence and home-grown mange-tout peas collapsed in 1971 and Mercantile and General snapped up his premises. Maurice moved to Billericay, George was installed at Wakelin All Saints as assistant manager. Maurice was thirty-five and a sadder man; George was then forty-nine and optimistic.

Optimism was an essential ingredient of George’s nature. Without it, he believed he might have suffered, particularly as he aged, the kind of despair that had driven his mother to hurl herself out of a flying fairground car at Clacton to a grossly foreseen death on a knitting of steel girders. He hadn’t seen her die, but his imagination supplied every terrible detail of the body’s fall, its breaking and bursting. Though forever afterwards afraid of heights, George knew that he was more afraid of the mind’s plummet to darkness, fearing that here was a phenomenon that might overcome him as easily, as seductively as his occasional cravings for young women. Sometimes, he imagined it in the form of a tornado hurling him upwards into a lonely twist of sky and from whose eternity there was no escape but the plunge down towards the faraway houses and the little ribbons of roads, dead, just as his mother had been, long before he heard the shouting and screaming of the watching crowds. George saw friends of his begin to exhibit the mannerisms of despair. He pitied and feared. He examined himself in his dressing-room mirror. He beamed. He thought of Jennifer’s wedding. He offered an imaginary Jennifer his arm. He remembered his mother’s flying body. He thought about Beryl’s birthday party. He drank imaginary champagne. He saw his office at the bank. He moved his imaginary body next door and placed it at the manager’s desk. He beamed at an imaginary customer. The imaginary customer was respectful and awed and anxious. He put him at his ease. He looked back at the mirror. His beaming smile had left him.

So yes, he’d been forced to agree with Beryl, it hadn’t been a very promising year. The question of the gone-forever managership interrupted both his sleep and his continuing cheerfulness. The dingyness of his room at the bank began to irritate him. He filled in a request slip for a red desk lamp. When, after two subsequent requests, it didn’t arrive, he went to Ipswich and bought himself one. And it was while he was in Ipswich that he confronted the poster (‘confronted’ is precisely what George did: he stood absolutely still and stared at a photograph of sand, palm and gentle surf). ‘Florida,’ it said. ‘Seven heavens under one sky.’

‘Seven heavens?’ Beryl had commented, disbelievingly, ‘seven figures more likely.’

Beryl’s pessimism, afflicting her more noticably after the menopause, served as an almost constant irritant to George’s struggle with his own sanity. His desire to be loved by twenty-year-old women had perhaps less to do with sexual excitement than with his faith in the buoyancy of youth. Like safe, wide rivers, his love affairs kept his spirit afloat. He would never, as long as he kept company with firm flesh, be tempted off the roaring roller-coaster. In this way, he absolved himself of all his betrayals.

The shiny new golf clubs in their heavy white and red leather bag were, for George, the most perfect expression of an intention: a recently matured insurance policy, begun in 1962, would buy him and Beryl a Florida October. They would stay not in some anonymous Holiday Inn, but at the unique Palmetto Village Complex between Boca Raton and Boca West. Here, a short drive from Miami Beach, George planned to ‘tee off for the experience of a lifetime’, a phrase he coined the day he brought home the Palmetto brochure and which he used constantly in the months preceding the departure, finding that it captured perfectly both his hopes and the envy of his listeners (this last a necessity when he reflected that he had actually been saving for this trip for twenty years). The travel agent promised temperatures in the 80s. Onto the brochure picture of a couple eating breakfast under a parasol he had, in his mind, superimposed his own face. (A sense of loyalty made him try to superimpose Beryl’s face opposite his own, but the woman under the parasol merely lost her identity, so that she was no longer the woman in the photograph, nor yet Beryl, but someone else, someone he could not actually put a face to.) He fondled the glinting golfing irons, felt their weight, putted balls across his sitting-room carpet, replaced them carefully and resisted any temptation to use them at the Woodbridge Golf Club. These were Florida irons. These were the tools of twenty years’ grind. With these he would swing four thousand miles away, while England crept to winter under her soggy burden of leaves. With these he would decide whether he was ever coming back.

A black security guard, wearing a stetson and barracaded into a wooden booth examined the photographs of George and Beryl. He looked from the photographs to the back of the Chevrolet cab where they sat. ‘Get out please, Sir,’ he snapped.

The guard looked from George to the photograph and back to George. He saw a freckled, stocky man – the colouring of a Scot, the craggy build, perhaps, of a Welshman. Once powerfully blue and considered his best feature, George’s eyes had faded, strangely, with time. His hair, once red, had faded too, not yet to white, but to an odd mixture of chestnut and grey, the colour of a certain breed of horse the name of which he always forgot. He was quite proud of his hair because it was still thick. He loved women to touch it.

‘Can your wife get out please.’

Massively unsmiling, the guard astonished George. His bulk, his blackness, his hat, his abrupt commands: all were astonishing.

‘He wants you to get out, Beryl.’

‘Do we have to sign something, or something?’

‘Dunno, dear. Careful of the clubs as you get out.’

The guard picked up Beryl’s photograph. It showed a woman in a cardigan, hair newly set in a style resembling as nearly as possible the Queen’s. (In his limited experience of English tourists, the security guard had noticed that a great number of women adopted this identical royal old-fashioned fashion.) Now, in a summer frock, Beryl’s flesh looked very pale, almost blue-white at her ankles. In the blinding sunshine, she manoeuvred herself cautiously round the car and lined herself up beside George. The guard stared at them.

‘Know the rules, Sir, Ma’am?’

‘Sorry?’ said George.

‘No one gets in or out of the village without the security passes or a phone-in ID from a Palmetto resident. Day or evening guests are exempted, pro-viding they’re with you, okay?’

‘I don’t think we’ll be having guests . . .’ began Beryl. ‘We don’t know anyone.’

‘Pass expires last day of October,’ the guard said with finality.

‘What if we want to renew?’ inquired George.

‘Re-new?’

‘Yes. If we decide . . .’

‘Take minimum two IDs to the PVC Office . . .’

‘PVC?’

‘Palmetto Village Complex Office, 3125 Oranto Boulevard, Boca Raton. Two IDs minimum, plus apartment rereservation documentation.’

It was all a bit of a jumble to me, said Beryl ten minutes later, as she slowly took in the details of the apartment, her home-to-be for a month of her life. But George wasn’t listening. He was standing at a sliding window, gazing with awe at two smiling men in check trousers and white short-sleeved shirts embarking for the tenth hole on their motorised golf cart. George was open-jawed. No one had told him that the golf course would be spread out, like the Garden of Eden, in front of his veritable window.

‘What about this, Beryl!’ he exploded.

‘I like the bathroom, George. Do come and see the bathroom . . .’

‘Twenty-four hour round the clock bloody paradise!’

‘What, dear?’

‘It’s right here. Right in front of our balcony!’

‘What? The golf course?’

‘Yes.’

‘Do you think we’re members automatically, being Palmetto residents?’

‘Of course we are. It’s one of the privileges. Golf and the swimming pool. Free to all Palmetto inmates.’

Beryl crossed the soft-carpeted room and stood next to George, looking out. As the two golfers drove off, a sudden wind frayed the inert palms and sang through the mosquito meshing. Beryl blew her nose. ‘I don’t expect those little carts are free’ she said.

George woke with a feeling of joy he couldn’t remember experiencing since he was twelve and sent one summer from a morbidly quiet home to a seaside scout camp in Cornwall.

He lay and admired the room. He sensed the different ways in which it had been designed with the privileged in mind: heavy drapes at the window, letting in no hint of the colossal day beginning outside them, wall-to-wall white louvered cupboards with heavy gold-plated knobs, built-in dressing alcove, complete with lace-covered tissue dispenser, additional makeup mirror and gilded ring tree (on which Beryl had hung her only ring, a faded bit of Victorian turquoise), heavy glass table burdened with heavy magazines and a piece of modern sculpture which George’s unpractised eye had privately christened “Man Copulating With Hoop”, chandelier style ceiling light, high pile white carpet, a framed bullfight poster, a set of eighteenth-century French prints, showing wigged aristocrats engaged in what seemed to be flirtation. It was worth it, George whispered to himself, worth every penny just to have got this far.

His clock, re-set to US time, told him it was 7.10 a.m. Beryl slept her habitual hunched-up sleep, unvarying it seemed in any time zone. George crept to the bathroom, peed as quietly as he could (Florida lavatories seemed to echo less than English ones) and dressed quickly in brand-new lightweight trousers, holiday shirt and new canvas shoes. Picking up the apartment key, monumentally tagged to stop anyone pocketing it, he tiptoed out, pausing only to stare breathlessly at the quality of the light coming into the sitting room from across the golf course.

The Palmetto apartment buildings, though near to each other, were each arranged around their own careful garden. The grass was constantly watered and very green; in sculptured stone basins, shaded by palms, apologetic fountains sent feeble jets of water onto ferns and lilies. Planted among the oleander trees in each central courtyard was a marble map of the village. Gold lettering informed George YOU ARE HERE. Thanking the Palmetto planners for their foresight and helpfulness, George began to follow the memorised marble path to the circle marked GOLF COURSE ENTRY.

I am walking, he thought, with springy step. I slept a free sleep, uncluttered by any hint of nightmare. It’s seven in the morning of my first day and already I’ve shaken England off like jumble sale clothes, just chucked it away, the better to breathe, the better to relax my shoulders, the better to tap a miraculous new energy located if I’m not wrong, or rather, beginning, at my groin and going through me like spring sap. And I am, extraordinarily, alone. It’s as if, on this entire peninsular, no one is moving yet, unless it’s the security guard, housed up in his booth, gun at the ready to protect me and all those asleep including Beryl from marauders and rapists and felons. A light wind is making me wish I’d brought along my pale blue C & A poloneck, but this is no doubt a dawn wind, very likely to die down as the sun hots up. Someone, I can now hear, is vacuuming the swimming pool. I dare say this is done regularly every morning to leave it jewel-bright for my pre-breakfast swim. If I was wise, I would pop into the pool complex to ascertain the temperature of the water . . .

A wagon, not unlike an enlarged version of the little golf carts, was parked at the entrance to the swimming pool. On its immaculate sides was written PALMETTO GARDENING INC. and George now noticed that the vehicle was stocked with every variety of garden implement, including heavy yellow hoses. Nothing looked dirty. He recalled the rusting rural slum of his own garden shed and marvelled. Hardly any rain, of course he remembered, that would explain the absence of rust, but not the astonishing appearance of newness. A hoe looked as bright as his No. 2 iron.

Beside the wooden doorway to the pool was another marble map, again informing George, YOU ARE HERE. Wondering whether any resident of Palmetto had ever been lost anywhere in the village, he pushed open the door. The pool, roman-ended, was forty foot by eighteen. Gently moving the vacuum pole around its shallow end was a girl with long, colourless hair. She looked up immediately and stared at George. George stared. The girl was twenty. She wore skimpy, faded shorts and, above these, what looked to George like a home-stitched vest over ostentatiously milky breasts, damp nippled.

‘Hi,’ she said.

Beryl woke with astonishment and with the immediate certainty that she had a cold. Her throat was sore and her head ached. She called in the direction of the bathroom, ‘George, are you up?’ She waited. The only sound she could hear was a distant whooshing noise, perpetual, the Florida wind blowing in off the sea. Drawing back the heavy curtains, she blinked at the startling blue and green. The clarity of the morning made her wish that her own head would clear. She blamed this misfortune of a cold on altitude and climatic change.

‘GOOD MORNING, PALMETTO RESIDENT!’ said a plastic notice screwed to the kitchen wall. ‘You are reminded that we do not serve breakfast as part of our four-star Palmetto Hospitality Agenda, but we hope you will make the fullest use of your kitchen facility. Your PALMETTO SHOP is located on Square 3 and will be delighted to sell you hot French bread, butter, jelly, tea, coffee, chocolate, milk, and of course Florida oranges. Meat for your griddle may also be obtained from your PALMETTO SHOP, should you prefer a substantial morning meal. The SHOP is open Monday through Sunday, eight to eight. Have a nice day.’

Beryl opened the fridge to see whether the previous Palmetto tenant had kindly left her anything in the way of breakfast materials, but the fridge was completely empty except for a cellophane-wrapped half bottle of Veuve Cliquot champagne, given free with every reservation of a week or longer. ‘Drat it,’ she commented, and, crossing back to the bedroom to dress for shopping, was startled by an unexpected and quite unfamiliar noise. The telephone was ringing.

Deciding that it must be George, and marvelling that he, who forgot important things with such regularity, had somehow memorised this number, she picked it up and said: ‘George? What are you doing?’

‘Beryl?’ said a near sounding English voice, ‘Brewer here. Brewer Smythe.’

Beryl thought, I’ve been astonished by every single thing since we got here and now here’s Brewer Smythe astonishing me even more by ringing me when it was months ago that George wrote to Brewer and Monica, and as far as I know there’s never been any reply from them.

‘Heavens!’ said Beryl.

‘Surprised you, eh?’

‘Well, to be honest, Brewer, I was just saying yesterday when we arrived that we didn’t know anybody in Florida. And how wrong I was. I mean, I’d just forgotten about you. Isn’t that terrible?’

‘Oh, don’t worry about trivial things like that, Beryl. How are you, anyway? And how’s the old man?’

‘Fine. We’re fine. A bit jet-lagged, I mean I think I am because I seem to have got a cold, which I’m sure isn’t usual. George has just popped out to . . . survey the golf course.’

‘Well, listen. What about a plunge in at the deep end on your first day, eh?’

‘Plunge in, Brewer?’

‘Yes. Mr Weissmann wants me to take him up to River Kingdom for lunch. That’s the best seafood place between here and Miami, and I’ve got you and George invited on the boat. Set off at 10.30-ish. Have cocktails on board. Get to River Kingdom at 12.30. George’ll love it, Beryl.’

‘Well, I don’t know if I’m up to it, Brewer. I mean, with this cold . . .’

‘Course you are. Best thing. Blow the cobwebs away.’

‘Well, are you sure Mr Weissmann doesn’t mind?’

‘Absolutely! Told him George was not only an old friend, but a banker. He has the greatest respect for bankers.’

‘It’s very kind of you, Brewer . . .’

‘Monica’s coming. She’s really looking forward to seeing you.’

‘How is she?’

‘Monica? Well, you wait till you see her! I tell you, Beryl, she’s a changed woman since we moved here. If you say Woodbridge to Monica now, she can hardly remember what you’re talking about!’

‘Really?’

‘Changed woman! But how are you and George finding it? Paradise, eh? Good first impressions, eh?’

Beryl hesitated. She realised the hesitation made her sound somehow ungrateful.

‘I think it’s all . . . extraordinary, Brewer. It’ll take a bit of getting used to, but I’m sure once we do . . .’

‘You’ll never want to go home! Guarantee it, Beryl. Only to pack and get back here as fast as you can. You wait and see. But hats off to George for getting you here, anyway. So look, I’ll be round to fetch you at 10.15. Oh, and Beryl, lunch is on us.’

Beryl sat down in the foodless kitchen. It’s the kind of day, she thought, when I’m going to find it quite hard to believe anything that’s happening.

‘I’m new,’ George had said to the girl.

‘Yeah?’

She moved the pool vac with a steady, practised motion. George watched her. Her feet were bare. Her legs were long and tanned, the hairs on them golden and flat and unshaven.

‘This is my first morning.’

‘Yeah?’

‘Yes. I was just doing a little, you know, recky.’

‘Pool’s okay. I prefer the ocean, though.’

The ocean. The thundering little word struck chords of magnificence in George’s willing mind. He saw the girl walking bravely into breast-high surf, hair flying and wet, mouth parted on gleaming teeth. America, he thought. She is vigorous America. He wanted to scoop her and the ocean into his lap.

‘You’ve got the lot here, I’d say.’

‘Pardon me?’

‘Here. Climate, beaches, comfort, golf, ocean . . .’

‘Yeah, it’s okay. I miss the city, though.’

‘The city? Do you?’

‘Kind of. People want to learn in the city. Here, they’re just all hipped on forgetting.’

George began to walk round the pool. Trying not to stare at the girl, he concentrated on its tiled blue depths.

‘I suppose you do gardening as well? I saw your truck. If I may say so, I think the Palmetto gardens are most attractive.’

He heard her laugh. The young laughter made him feel suddenly old, and he stood still.

‘I’m a qualified landscape architect,’ said the girl. ‘I got fired when I had my baby. Gardener was all I could get.’

‘Um,’ said George, uneasily, ‘there’s a lot of that happening.’

‘Pardon me?’

‘Well, that kind of thing. People over-qualified for the jobs they’re doing.’

The girl didn’t comment. George allowed himself to look up at her arm, slim but seemingly strong, moving the pool vac. The vigorous brown hair she chose to display in her armpit gave him a feeling both of excitement and of disquiet. Everything, he thought, in this country is utterly unfamiliar to me. I will go home an altered man.

‘So you’ve got a baby?’

‘Yeah. She’s three months now.’

‘A daughter? I have a daughter, Jennifer. She got married this year.’

‘So you miss her, uhn?’

‘Yes. In a way. My wife does.’

‘Your wife with you out here?’

‘Yes.’

‘Great. Well have a nice stay.’

George recognised this as a dismissal. He began to walk slowly towards the pool exit, disappointed that the encounter had had a dull shape. Without identifying what, he knew that the minute he saw the girl he had hoped for something more. He stood, hands in his stiff new pockets, and stared at the roman end of the pool.

‘Bet no one much gets up this early.’ he said.

‘No. We do, the gardeners and cleaners.’

‘If I’m not being rude,’ George began, ‘I’d very much, I mean very much like to know –’

‘Know what?’

‘Your name.’

The girl held the pool vac still and stared accusingly at George.

‘Want to fly me, or something?’

‘What did you say?’

‘Never mind. I don’t give my name, though. Not to strangers.’

‘The telephone went,’ said a brightly dressed Beryl, who had decided bravely that she wouldn’t mention her cold to George. ‘It was Brewer.’

‘Brewer?’

‘Yes, Brewer. We’re invited onto Mr Weissmann’s boat for the day.’

‘Which day?’

‘Today. Now please let me have the key, George, and I’ll go and buy us some bread and what they call jelly for breakfast.’

‘How was Brewer?’

‘Very cock-a-hoop. He said Monica was a changed woman.’

‘Did you agree?’

‘I haven’t seen her yet, dear, so how could I agree or disagree?’

‘No. To go on the boat.’

‘Yes. It’s very kind of Mr Weissmann.’

‘It’s our first day, Beryl.’

‘Well, I know, but Brewer said there’s a trip to some fish restaurant and I know you’d like that.’

‘Suppose we can get in a game of golf this evening.’

‘If we feel like it. I mean, after cocktails and lunch and all that, we may want a little sleep.’

‘Oh I won’t. We’ve only got a month, Beryl. We shouldn’t waste a second.’

‘Well, we’ll see. I’ll go and get the breakfast on Square 3, wherever that is.’

‘Easy, dear. Just follow the map.’

When Beryl had gone, George opened the sliding window and sat down on the balcony under the white parasol. Here I am, he thought, like the man in the brochure. In the picture, though, there didn’t seem to be any wind. Everything seemed hotter and calmer and much safer than it feels. Slightly breathless from what had been a long walk, he noticed in himself a mildly disturbing sense of unease, a feeling of fright. He slowed his breathing, took gulps of warm air. Careful never to lie to himself about his states of mind, he asked himself, was it the girl, her presence by the pool, her misunderstanding of an innocent, yes innocent question? Had the girl got in the way of contentment? He’d tried to forget her as he’d trod the lush turf of the Palmetto Golf Course, saying to himself she doesn’t belong, she’s a fugitive from the city, that’s it, the Fugitive Kind, giving birth on Greyhound buses, breastfeeding on the freeway, in the subway, no matter where, never belonging with her provoking underarm hair, belonging nowhere, particularly not here, in a guarded village where no one passes without a pass, where the marble maps reassure you every few yards, YOU ARE HERE. Yet he hadn’t been able to forget her. The girl and the great wind blowing from the east, they buffeted him and made him feel small.

George got up, crossed to the louvered bedroom cupboards and dragged out the leather bag of golf clubs. He carried them to the balcony and sat for a moment with his arms around them.

Brewer Smythe drove a Cadillac. George and Beryl sat beside him in the wide front seat, both wondering but not asking whether the car was Brewer’s or Weissmann’s.

Brewer was immensely fatter than when last glimpsed, trailing fatigue and failure around his Woodbridge boatyard. But he wore his new flesh proudly, like he might have worn a new suit, set it off with the whiteness of his naval shirt, topped it with a grinning, ruddy face and a naval-style cap gold-inscribed Nadar III. Body and uniform said, I’ve prospered. Freckles had formed on his arms so densely, they merged into a blotchy, chestnut coloured tan. On his wrist, an oversized platinum digital watch seemed put there as a reminder that here was a man to whom time had behaved kindly. Fifty-five now, this was Brewer’s fourth year in Florida, working for the rich boat-owners of the most expensive waterways in the world, transforming years of worthless nautical knowledge into a sudden bonanza.

‘Well, Monica’s falling over herself!’ said Brewer, simultaneously pressing a knob marked ‘window lock’ and another marked ‘air’. ‘Faces from Suffolk in our very own Boca Raton! It’s hard to believe, honestly it is.’

‘You look ever so well, Brewer,’ said Beryl.

‘Me? I’m in the pink. Never happier. Honestly. Best years of my life out here. You wait and see.’

‘What’s this Weissmann like?’ asked George.

Brewer drew effortlessly into the fast lane of the freeway and accelerated.

‘He’s rich, George. I’d never seen wealth like his till I came out here. You wait till you see Nadar. And his house. Jesus! I’m not fooling when I say he’s got a Picasso in his hallway.’

‘Good to work for, is he?’

‘Man of the world. Married three times. Knows how to treat people. We’d be nowhere, Mon and me, without someone like him.’

‘What do you do for him exactly, Brewer?’ asked Beryl. ‘I mean, I know you’re his kind of captain, but is all you do is look after his boat?’

‘I provide a service, Beryl,’ announced Brewer. ‘I think today will give you a fair impression of the service I provide. Men like Weissmann, people in the art and business field, don’t have the time or the knowledge for practicalities; they want leisure to run smoothly, you understand what I mean? So he relies on me. Total trust. Absolute round-the-clock responsibility. And that’s what I’m paid for.’

Off the freeway after a few miles, the Cadillac was ambling now along a series of identical avenues of houses, low, detached and white, or built of sandstone blocks, each with a sloping front garden, tarmac driveway and wrought-iron gates leading to patios and swimming pools. Palms dwarfed the houses everywhere. ‘You can travel,’ Brewer informed George and Beryl, ‘from your back garden to the ocean through the Florida canals. Unique in the world, and we’ve done it in Nadar III. Extraordinary, eh?’

‘Cracking,’ said George.

Their arrival at Nadar’s mooring was awkward. Monica, in slacks and shocking-pink silk shirt and rattling with charm bracelets, mouthed an enthusiastic silent welcome to George and Beryl, while Weissmann, perched like a beady little penguin at the forward controls of the bulky boat, stared at them sullenly. Near to the thrice-married, sixty-year-old Weissmann was a fat, huge-eyed boy of ten, who also stared, sucking gum, with the brazen stare of the uniquely pampered.

Beryl looked up cautiously and smiled at Weissmann. His face remained impassive. Beryl turned to Brewer for help. Brewer, dwarfed by the boat, seemed momentarily to have lost both bulk and bounce.

‘Mr Weissmann,’ he said politely, ‘may I present my good friends from England, Mr and Mrs Dawes – George and Beryl.’

‘Welcome aboard,’ said Weissmann, flatly. His accent was pure Germanic, almost unmixed with Yankee. He put a hirsute arm on the boy’s rounded shoulder and announced, still unsmiling: ‘This is my son, Daren. You see my boat is named Nadar. Daren is one half of Nadar. Daren is Dar. The Na piece of it comes from my wife’s name. Nadia. Unfortunately, Nadia is in Paris, so Daren is stuck with his old Daddy, aren’t you, Choots?’

‘Choots’ didn’t reply at once, but continued to gaze blankly at George and Beryl.

‘It’s very kind of you, Mr Weissmann,’ began Beryl.

‘No, no,’ said Weissmann, ‘friends of Brewer’s from England, this is the least we can do, eh Choots?’

‘Daddy,’ said Choots, ‘are you going to pay for their lunch?’

‘Do you want to handle her today, Mr Weissmann?’ called Brewer from the aft controls, as he swung the boat out into the wide canal.

From the front cabin, where George and Beryl waited silently with Monica, you could just glimpse the enormous metal and plastic chair on the upper deck where Weissmann sat, a complex control panel laid out in front of him. Choots stood disconsolately beside him.

Monica whispered, ‘Brewer has to be ever so careful. It’s a new boat, you see, and Mr Weissmann hasn’t quite got the hang.’

‘I’ll handle her,’ Weissmann called back to Brewer, ‘then when we get to River Kingdom, you take her in.’

‘Okay, Sir. She’s all yours, then. I’ll do the cocktails.’

‘Good. No cocktail for Choots today,’ and here began a tremor of a smile in Weissmann’s voice, ‘he’s too young.’

Brewer turned to George and Beryl who were now both looking at Monica. Monica was indeed a changed person. Like Brewer, she seemed to have undergone a colour metamorphosis. They remembered a faded, brown-shod woman with greying hair and an illusive, apologetic smile. What now confronted them was a blonde with shiny, tanned face, wearing Italian white sandals and azure eye shadow. The smile had broadened, found confidence. The voice, when she eventually began to talk to them, had taken on enough American vowel-richness to alter it greatly. It was, in fact, difficult to believe that this was Monica. Brewer put his arm round his wife and offered her proudly for inspection. ‘Looking neat, eh? Looking terrific, isn’t she?’

‘I wouldn’t have recognised you, Monica,’ said Beryl.

Monica beamed, let Brewer smack a kiss on her blonde head.

‘What can I say?’ she said. ‘That’s what Florida does.’

‘You look great, Mon,’ said George.

‘Thanks, George. Well, it’s great to see you, isn’t it, Brewer? And on your first day. You just wait till you’ve been here a week. You’ll never want to go home.’

‘So Brewer says,’ said George.

‘What’s it to be?’ asked Brewer, opening a polished drinks cabinet, ‘bloody marys, whisky sours . . .?’

‘Heavens,’ said Beryl, ‘we don’t normally drink this early, do we George?’

‘That’s the whole point of it, Beryl,’ said Brewer, ‘to start doing what you don’t usually do. We’ve learned that, haven’t we, Monica? Only then will you get in tune with Florida life.’

‘I’ll have my usual,’ said Monica.

‘Oh, what’s your usual?’ asked Beryl.

‘Make one for Beryl, Brewer,’ said Monica, ‘then she’ll see.’

Every room and compartment on Nadar III appeared to have been designed to accommodate what George had heard was called Cocktail Hour. Little veneered glass holders were clamped to chair arms, recessed into walls, bolted even to the lavatory tiles. You could not move on Nadar without finding a convenient place to set down your drink. Noting this, George thought, being rich is the art of forethought. I am too random a person, despite my ability with figures, to predict accurately where I or my guests might want to set down their cocktails. Everything on this boat is in precisely the right place with regard to its function, but I have none of the skills I recognise in this kind of planning. He stared up at Weissmann’s seat of power, wondered what it would be like to stare at it almost every day, as Brewer did, and to know that all one possessed emanated from there, from a German art dealer who was fond of bankers. He looked at Brewer, expertly shaking and mixing cocktails. He’s grown fat, he thought suddenly, to protect himself. But then George berated himself for this idiotic tendency he’d failed to leave behind in England – his tendency to analyse and question and seek the comfort of certainties. It impedes, he thought, my positive response to whatever happens, and the only important thing, here, is to enjoy myself.

River Kingdom, a flat-roofed, blue-painted building with its own substantial mooring, was, George decided, rather like a fish theatre. Models of lobsters and crayfish and crabs and blue-fin sharks busked up the walls and across the ceiling, netting hung down in carefully arranged loops, tanks of living eels were spotlit, menus were like programmes: Act One, shrimp-crab-mussel-prawn-clam-oyster, Act Two, brill-striped bass-eel-mullet-lobster-shark fin and so on through a dramatis personae of water meat George had never in his life encountered. Waitresses in usherette black brought unasked-for salads as an overture to the meal. Outside the sun went in, as if the house lights had suddenly been turned down.

George was seated between Weissmann and Monica. Daren sat between his father and Brewer, which left the two women next to each other. But Weissmann, who had arranged the seating, had deliberately placed Beryl and Monica in seats where he wouldn’t have to talk to them. Duty called on him to tolerate his captain and his friend as lunch guests, but not their wives. The elaborate courtesies he reserved for the women of his own elite weren’t available for the likes of Beryl: patronage went only so far.

Beryl and Monica talked about England and Suffolk in particular and Woodbridge and Wakelin All Saints. At one moment, George heard Monica say, ‘I’ve forgotten to ask him, I suppose George is manager by now?’ and cast an anxious look at Beryl, who seemed defeated both by her gigantic shark steak and by the question. He looked away.

‘So,’ said Weissmann, turning an indifferent eye upon George, ‘you like America.’

This was neither question nor statement, but something in between. George looked at Brewer, who was grinning encouragingly, then coughed.

‘It’s our first time,’ he said. ‘We flew from Gatwick yesterday. I’m quite surprised by everything I’ve seen.’

‘Surprised? In what way surprised?’

‘Oh, I don’t know,’ said George, ‘it’s very hard to pinpoint precisely where the differences occur. Everything seems unlike England in a way I can’t yet explain. I thought it might just be a question of size and climate, but it isn’t.’

‘Well,’ said Weissmann, portentously, ‘this is the United States.’

‘Right, Sir!’ said Brewer. ‘I’ve been saying to George, now that he’s here, he’ll never want to go back. We haven’t. We’ve never had a moment’s regret.’

‘You like Europe?’ asked Weissmann, blackly. And George felt an irritating panic rise in him. Europe. The images conjured by Weissmann’s use of the word, the images to which he was expected to respond, were all, all as alien to George as words like quatrocento and surréaliste and schadenfreude and Auschwitz. Weissmann, American, Jew, knew ‘Europe’; George, Englishman and part of Europe, did not.

‘I’m fond of the country,’ said George, taking up the wine one of the usherettes had poured for him.

‘Which country?’ said Weissmann.

‘The countryside,’ stammered George, ‘the countryside of England.’

‘But Brewer said you were a banker.’

‘Yes. I am. I’m with Mercantile and General.’

‘In the City, no?’

‘What, London? Oh no, I’m not in London.’

‘So you’re not a real banker, then.’

George was saved from having to comment on his own reality by the nagging of Choots who, with the underwater world spread out for his delectation, had ordered cold roast beef and pickles.

‘This isn’t nice, Daddy,’ said Choots.

‘No?’ said Weissmann.

‘No.’

‘Why did you choose it, then?’

‘I didn’t choose it. Brewer chose it for me.’

Brewer smiled. ‘It’s what he asked for, Sir.’

‘Don’t eat it,’ Weissmann said, ‘give it to Brewer.’

Choots went off to the serve-yourself sweet table and helped himself to a wedge of chocolate gateau. Brewer good-naturedly crammed the thick slices of red beef onto his lobster plateau and proceeded to eat both simultaneously.

Weissmann smiled.

‘He’s a good man, Brewer, your friend,’ he said to George, ‘he does what I ask, eh Brewer?’

‘Yes, Sir!’

‘I spoil my son, you are thinking. In Europe, children are not spoiled. I was not spoiled. I was kicked and bullied. Now, I’m the one with the boots, you see? But not for my son. He will have what he wants because I am too old to be a good father and this is punishment enough. So you’re not really a banker?’

George found Weissmann’s twists and turns of thought vexing; he invited you to enter a conversation, then left you no room to participate in it.

‘I’ve been in banking all my life,’ said George quietly.

‘You know money?’

This was like the Europe question. It reverberated cavernously with meaning inaccessible to the likes of George. He sighed. This was the first sigh he had heard himself breathe since landing at Miami airport. To his own astonishment, he heard himself say angrily, ‘I know, Mr Weissmann, what this holiday is costing me.’

Monica’s special cocktail hadn’t agreed with Beryl’s stomach. Back at Palmetto, she was lying in the large bed (lying, she realised, rather stiff and straight so as not to rumple the sheets an unseen maid had so carefully smoothed) feeling pale and drowsy. George, perched by the Man Copulating With Hoop, stared anxiously at his wife.

‘Why don’t you go off and have a game of golf, George?’ Beryl suggested.

George smiled. ‘I can’t play with myself, Beryl.’

Beryl placed her two hands comfortingly on her stomach and tried to breathe deeply. A novice at the Wakelin All Saints Yoga for Beginners, she had learned that pain can be relieved by mind control allied to correct breathing.

‘I’m terribly sorry, George. I don’t know whether it was the shark or Monica’s cocktail, or just simply me. I didn’t take to that Weissmann, did you?’

‘Just rest, Beryl.’

‘I’m alright to talk. I wouldn’t want to be Brewer, would you?’

‘He’s changed.’

‘I wouldn’t want to be at the beck and call of a spoilt person like that.’

‘Brewer doesn’t seem to mind. And anyway, we don’t know him, Beryl. I expect art connoisseurs are a difficult lot.’

‘Do go and play golf, dear. I’m sure you’ll find someone to give you a game.’

George got up and crossed to the bed. ‘Going to have a bit of a sleep, then, are you?’

‘I think I will.’

‘Good boat, wasn’t it? Imagine owning that.’

‘Too powerful for me. Too built up.’

‘Built up?’

‘Well, it was just one deck put on top of another, put on top of another, wasn’t it? No line.’

George looked fondly at Beryl. There were moments – not very many – when his abiding sense of his wife as a humdrum woman suddenly parted like the Red Sea and another (sensitive, sharp-witted) Beryl came striding through. This was one such moment.

‘Rest, love,’ he said gently, and touched her forehead with his finger, as if offering her a benediction.

Beryl closed her eyes and seemed, in that instant, asleep. George tiptoed out of the room and quietly closed the door. He walked to the balcony window of the sitting room and stared longingly at the golf course. Above it, behind the palms, the sky was flat and grey – a peculiarly English sky – and the wind was blowing hard. The sun hadn’t been seen after they’d sat down to lunch at River Kingdom, and the journey home through choppy water had been disagreeable. Weissmann had left the boat with only a nod to George and Beryl, saying anxiously to Brewer, ‘There may be a storm. Make sure the mooring is very safe.’

George had no sense of any impending storm, but the golf course was clearly deserted. Palmetto people only played golf in the sunshine. Or else they knew that a storm was coming, they read signs that George was unable to decipher, bought their evening griddle steaks and drew their heavy curtains.

It was warm in the room. George opened the sliding balcony window. The parasol had been closed and only the fringe moved slightly with the wind. George sat down at the table and rubbed his eyes. Too much has happened, he thought, in the space of time I had reserved only for an arrival. The extraordinary early morning joy, the girl with her damp breasts and her disdain, the ride in the Cadillac, the boat trip, lunch, Choots, tiny glimpses into worlds and lives he would never know; he was left with a feeling of stifling confusion. ‘I need time,’ he said aloud, ‘I need more time.’

He began to soothe himself with the comfort of the coming days and weeks. Hot, quiet days spent with Beryl on the golf course, lunches at the pool, shopping for gifts for Jennifer in the famous shopping malls, a day trip to Miami beach . . .

George sat back, folded his arms. He was tired, he now recognised. The time change had suddenly hit him. He closed his eyes, heard the wind fill his head. Why had no one mentioned the presence of the wind? Then, on the edge of sleep, he heard his own voice announce with sudden and absolute certainty: ‘They’re gone.’ His eyes snapped open. He stared down, tracing each concrete foot of the balcony on which he sat. He felt nauseous, drained. He ran a moist hand through his thick hair. ‘They’re gone.’

He got up. The maid had moved them, had she? She had put them back in the louvered cupboard or propped them up by the door? He crossed the sitting room, entered the kitchen. They weren’t by the door, they weren’t in the kitchen. He was sweating now, drenched in sweat. He would have to wake Beryl or risk waking her by opening the wardrobes. He opened the bedroom door quietly. Beryl was asleep, nose gasping at the ceiling. George moved stealthily to the cupboards, pulled them wide open, gazed at his lightweight clothes, Beryl’s cotton dresses, their mingled pile of new shoes, recognising that what he was feeling was fear, a drenching of fear such as he couldn’t remember since, as a timid boy, the secret mouldering apple store in his toy cupboard had been crushed to pulp by his mother’s suicidal rage, dinky cars and lead soldiers, cigarette cards and painted matchboxes lying ruined and stained in brown rot.

‘Beryl . . .’ he said tightly.

Beryl moved but slept on, snoring gravely.

‘Beryl . . .’ George heard the choke in his voice and knew it for a suppressed scream. ‘Someone has stolen my golf clubs.’

Beryl didn’t move, but opened a bleary eye and looked at her husband. ‘George,’ she said, alarmed, ‘are you crying?’

The black security guard shifted his massive frame on the high backed chair and turned towards the chain-locked side door of his booth on which George had tremblingly knocked.

‘Come round to the window!’ yelled the guard. He touched his gun with a wide finger, let a signal for dangerous and immediate action ripple through his chest and arms. George’s rowan head appeared at the booth glass.

‘Can I see your pass, Sir?’

George fumbled for his wallet, into which he had carefully put his pass and Beryl’s.

‘I’ve come to report a theft . . .’ began George.

‘Security pass, please,’ snapped the guard.

George laid the pass on the little counter, wanted to comment that the guard had seen him not one hour ago as Brewer drove them home in the Cadillac, but refrained from saying this and waited patiently while the guard examined his (by now familiar, surely?) photograph inside its piece of transparent plastic.

‘Theft, you said?’

‘Yes.’ George cleared his throat. ‘I left my golf clubs on my balcony . . .’

‘We don’t get theft at Palmetto. You better have another search.’

‘I have searched. The golf clubs are not in my apartment.’

‘You got insurance?’

‘Yes. I have a policy with Norwich Union . . .’

‘Okay, this is one for the PVC Office. Take minimum two IDs down to 3125 Oranto Boulevard and state the exact nature and time of the theft. All unsecured property, however, is disclaimed for responsibility purposes by Palmetto Village Security and balcony property is deemed unsecured for this purpose.’

‘What?’ said George.

‘All unsecured, that is open or balcony property is disclaimed for responsibility purposes by PV Security.’

‘You mean Palmetto is not responsible?’

‘You got it.’

‘Then I don’t see the point of these passes and all the security regulations. If you can just let a thief walk in and steal my golf clubs . . .’

‘You tell the PVC Office, Sir.’

‘And what will they do?’

‘You got two IDs?’

‘Yes. What will the Palmetto Office do?’

‘Question you, Sir.’

‘Question me! Look, I was out all day. I returned at four thirty p.m. to find my clubs missing. That’s all I can tell them. But I am not exaggerating when I say that those clubs cost me almost a month’s salary. I want them found and the thief caught!’

George realised that he was shouting. Fatigue, he thought, and fear have made me deaf to my own voice. The guard was staring at him with interest, the stare of a man watching a zoo-caged animal. He avoided the stare and turned to walk away.

Behind him the PALMETTO GARDENING van had appeared like an apparition, soundless and unseen. George stopped and stared at it. His hand, still clutching his wallet, was shaking. The girl tugged on the hand brake, unfolded her willowy body from the cart and strode to the booth. In the strong wind, her hair was whipped around her face, hiding it from George. ‘Everything conspires,’ he heard himself whisper, not knowing precisely what he meant. He watched without moving as the girl waved her security pass at the guard, heard the guard say, ‘Hi, Cindy. Get home before the storm, Uhn?’ George’s eyes moved to the skimpy vest. He saw that her nipples were dry.

‘Hello,’ he said quietly.

The girl turned. The wind caught her hair, lifting it back from her face. She reached up and held the hair and looked down at George. He noticed for the first time how very tall she was.

‘Oh . . .’ she said.

George clutched his wallet, willed his body to stop shaking. I’m ill, he thought, and the girl began it. He tried to smile at her. Rested, refreshed and at peace with himself – on some other day – he could have said, ‘Don’t misunderstand the kind of man I am. I only asked your name because I prefer everything to be known and unambiguous. Although I find you extraordinary and might allow myself the luxury of erotic fantasising around your milky breasts and your eyes as grey as the sky, I would never presume, that is I would never be so vain as to suppose you would give me anything of yourself . . .’ Instead, he said nothing at all, saw the girl glance anxiously from him to the cart full of tools to the guard who was smiling at her, his massive presence transfigured by the smile.

‘Not many takers,’ mumbled George.

‘Pardon me?’ said the girl quickly.

‘For the pool,’ said George, indicating the dense cloud above them.

‘Oh,’ said the girl, ‘I guess not.’

And she was gone, springing back into the cart, waving at the guard, who waved back, and driving off down the clean grey road that led to the freeway.

The storm came rolling in on a sky blacker than dusk. Beryl made tea. The pains in her stomach came and went.

George sat on the sofa and listened to the vast, moving sheets of rain exploding against the sliding windows, felt the building shudder in the body of the wind.

Two thoughts chased each other round his brain which felt squeezed and bruised: Weissmann’s boat is adrift and sinking in the storm; the girl stole my golf clubs, stowed them and hid them among her shiny garden tools, and will sell them to buy things for her baby . . .

Beryl came in and looked at George. ‘Change your mind and have some tea, George,’ she said.

But no, he didn’t want tea. ‘I’m beginning to think, Beryl,’ he said, ‘that we never should have come.’

A sudden spasm of pain rose in Beryl’s stomach and she sat down on the sofa beside George with an ungainly bump.

‘Don’t be silly, dear,’ she said with as much energy as her voice could muster, ‘you’re usually the optimist.’

‘It was one of the gardeners,’ said George.

‘One of the gardeners what?’

‘Stole my golf clubs.’

‘I haven’t seen any gardeners.’

‘I have. Women.’

‘Well,’ said Beryl, placatingly, ‘as soon as the storm’s over – tomorrow morning – we’ll go down to the Palmetto Office and get it all sorted out.’

She understands nothing, thought George, nothing, nothing. Things cannot now be ‘sorted out’ because they are irrevocably altered. I have, in no more than twenty-four hours, encountered worlds that I do not understand. The girl is one world, the girl and her crime and the guard who is not interested that a crime has been committed against me. The other world is Weissmann, whose voice challenged me, yes challenged me at the entrance to some cave or echoey place and in that cave were all the songs and sufferings of a continent and the rich, rich owners of the wealth of that continent that I do not, nor will ever possess nor understand. I have, in a trice, simply understood my own profound and unchangeable insignificance.

Answering voices placated, denied: you said you wanted ‘recovery from mediocrity’. You cannot ‘recover from mediocrity’ unless you understand the nature of that mediocrity. You have now begun to understand. At sixty, it’s not too late to make a start, just as autumn is not merely a dying off, but as the leaves fly, hard new buds form already and wait for April . . .

‘I suppose,’ said Beryl suddenly, ‘we should have bought steak or something for the griddle. You’ll be hungry later on.’

But they weren’t hungry and didn’t eat. The wind howled and screamed in the mosquito wire. On the balcony, the table fell over and the parasol went flying off into the night like a javelin. The pain in Beryl lessened and she got out the cards. George agreed blankly to play Gin Rummy and silently won every round till the lights went out and Beryl gave a little scream. Almost simultaneously, the telephone rang and George fumbled his slow and terrified way to the kitchen to answer it. Beryl found a table lighter, which clicked up a minute yellow flame. Holding this, she came and stood by George’s side.

The voice on the line sounded far away. Jennifer, thought George, it’s Jennifer. Something’s happened in England.

‘Jen?’

‘What?’ said the voice.

‘Is that you, Jen? This is Dad.’

‘George? It’s Monica.’

‘Oh, Monica . . .’

‘Brewer thought we ought to ring, just to make sure you’re okay. It’s quite a bad storm. Have your lights gone?’

‘Yes. They just went.’

‘We’re still okay in Boca Raton. Poor you. What a welcome to Florida! Would you like Brewer to come over and get you in the car?’

‘No, no,’ said George, ‘we’re fine. But what about the boat?’

‘The boat?’

‘Weissmann’s boat. It’ll be adrift, won’t it?’

‘Well, I don’t think so, George. Why should it be?’

‘In the storm . . .’

‘Brewer will have taken care of it.’

‘I think it’s gone, Monica. I think it’s drifting and breaking . . .’

There was a long silence at Monica’s end of the telephone. George was aware that he was breathing petrified shallow breaths. Beryl’s face, lit by the tiny lighter flame, stared at him aghast. She reached out and gently took the telephone receiver from him.

‘Monica,’ she said, ‘this is Beryl.’

‘Oh, Beryl,’ said Monica, relieved, ‘what’s the matter with George? Is he afraid of the storm?’

‘No,’ said Beryl, ‘I don’t think it’s that.’

‘What’s happened, Beryl?’

‘Well, he’s just a bit upset because his golf clubs have been stolen.’

‘Stolen? At Palmetto? It’s not possible, Beryl. Palmetto’s like Fort Knox.’

‘Well, I know, but there you are. He left them on the balcony and they’re gone. They were brand new.’

‘Is he certain, Beryl? Has he looked everywhere?’

‘Oh yes. Everywhere.’

‘Well, I’m amazed. I never heard of anyone stealing anything at Palmetto . . .’

‘No. Well, I dare say there’s always a first time.’

‘Anyway, tell him not to worry. He can have Brewer’s. Brewer hardly plays any more. No, honestly, he’s too busy with Weissmann’s empire. I’ll bring them round in the morning.’

With Brewer’s golf clubs, scarcely less new and shiny than his own, and with the passing of the storm, the month began to settle down. The parasol lost in the storm was replaced, and religiously every morning George and Beryl breakfasted under it, like the people in the Palmetto brochure.

They were never again invited aboard Weissmann’s boat, nor did they glimpse the Picasso in his hallway. But they spent some time in the bungalow Brewer and Monica had recently bought at Boca Raton, struggling to find the superlatives with which to admire Brewer’s Seafarer Cocktail Cabinet, fitted out with mock compasses and other nautical pieces of brass entirely unfamiliar to them, and Monica’s polystyrene rock, dyed green and brown (like army camouflage, George noted privately) over which a recycled waterfall trickled continuously into a tiny circular swimming pool.

‘Doesn’t it all make you want to stay for ever?’ said Monica one morning to Beryl, as they wandered the expensive shopping malls in search of presents for Jennifer and her new husband. Beryl caught a glimpse of herself in the shop window they were passing; her skin was lightly tanned, her hair had been reshaped by Monica’s pet hairdresser, Giani, obliterating all its former resemblance to the Queen’s.

‘Well, I think I’ve changed,’ said Beryl, ‘and that’s probably a good thing. I think at our time in life, you need a little jolt like this – something different – to put everything in perspective. But George and I are happiest where we are. I don’t think Florida is quite right for us, not like it’s been right for you and Brewer.’

‘But Wakelin All Saints, Beryl, it’s such a backward little place.’

‘Yes, it is. Oh, I know that.’

‘And you said George won’t even get to be manager. Now, I’m sure Mr Weissmann has strings enough out here to fix George up with something. I mean, money isn’t a dirty word out here like it is in England. And if you’re in money, Beryl, as George is . . .’

‘Oh, he’s not “in” it, Monica. I think to be “in” money, you’ve got to have some, and George has never had any, only his salary.’

‘Well, he knows money.’

‘No. I don’t think he “knows” it, either. He just went into the bank because he thought it would be safe.’

‘Safe? Safe from what?’

‘Oh, you know, Monica. Sort of from the world.’

The world spins faster here, George decided. Storms and hurricanes arrive in moments; flowers on the Palmetto squares come out and die in a day; by the pool, my towel is dry and stiff in half an hour. And people disappear. The girl. Weissmann. I look for the girl every day. I’ve seen her little cart dozens of times, but she’s never in it or near it. One morning, I woke early and thought I was lying on her, my mouth on her milky breasts, my hand holding fast to her hair, like a rope. I got up and went to look for her. But I found a young man vacuuming the pool and she was nowhere. Probably she’s run away, knowing she committed a crime.

And Weissmann? Brewer has a photograph of the man shaking hands with President Reagan. Brewer sees Weissmann every day. Choots is dumped on Monica, who makes him apple pie. But Choots never addresses one word to me. We had our audience on the first day and now we’re forgotten, dismissed. We hire a dumpy cruiser one afternoon and pass Nadar III. Brewer waves. Weissmann, from his perched-up control panel, stares at us like complete strangers.

Jennifer wrote from England: ‘I don’t believe we’ve had such a glorious autumn in Suffolk since 1976. We’ve been mushrooming before breakfast three or four times, and the misty, sunny early mornings are superb. No rain for a couple of weeks now and an incredible blackberry crop. Shame you’re missing it, but trust the Florida sun compensates . . .’

So the month drifted to its end. Beryl sorted and wrapped the presents she had bought and acquired a lightweight canvas bag in which to carry them home. George took photographs hastily, badly, a last-minute snapping of palm and balcony and pool and river bungalow, then a final indoor sequence with Beryl moving obediently from room to room.

‘We should have thought about pictures earlier on, George,’ said Beryl, ‘I mean, pictures are half of it, aren’t they?’

‘Half of what, dear?’

‘It. The experience. So you don’t forget it.’

‘Don’t worry, Beryl. I won’t forget it.’

Beryl was seated on the velvet pile couch, tanned legs crossed, hair newly set (Giani had cut the front into a rigid fringe, which made Beryl look more severe – and more intelligent – than she was), and George was backing nearer and nearer to a line of bookshelves crammed with unread, leatherbound volumes inscribed ‘Weatherburns Classic Series’.

‘Watch out for the books,’ said Beryl.

‘I want to get you in, and just a suggestion of the balcony view . . .’

George’s bottom rammed the bookcase. Beryl’s mouth, composed primly for the photograph, fell open as she saw George and the books behind him begin to turn and revolve and finally disappear almost out of sight into a dark hole in the wall.

‘George!’ she yelped.

George tipped. The camera was jolted out of his hand and fell to the ground. He clutched at the books, recovered his balance, found himself inside a clean cupboard, smelling of airwick, completely empty except for one bulky, familiar object, propped up in a corner, safe, intact and still radiating its extraordinary newness – his bag of golf clubs.

Beryl was now at George’s side. ‘My God, George,’ she said, ‘you looked like a person on the Paul Daniels Magic Show!’

‘Look,’ said George, ‘just look.’

George picked up the camera and handed it to Beryl. He reached out for the leather strap of the golfing bag, hauled the bag out into the room, and let the false cupboard door revolve back into place behind him. Beryl said nothing, just watched as George touched the clubs in disbelief, examining each one, brushing a thin film of dust from the bag.

‘My God!’ he said.

‘Well . . .’ said Beryl.

Then George sighed, let the bag fall, walked very slowly to the balcony window and stared out. There was no wind on this day. The palm leaves hung limp and dry, the fringe of the parasol wasn’t moving. Gentle, tropical air filled the room with warmth, the sun dappled it with sprigs of bright light. In two days, George thought, we will be in Suffolk and the calendar on my office wall will say November.

‘At least we found them,’ said Beryl.

‘Yes,’ said George quietly.

‘Now we can go back with everything we came with.’

‘Yes,’ said George, but smiled a wide, astonished smile that Beryl never saw. She’s wrong, he thought. We won’t go back to England with all that we carried with us to America. There’s a part of me which has been replaced.