Jeremy had told her as a boy, he was called by his mother Jam, since his face turned red as jam. Later, he had learned to be less embarrassed. Less pensive. He remantled himself, had even changed his surname, and when he told her, Alexandra thought she recognized something of herself, a sense of destiny’s fungibility.
Jeremy had told her too that when he was growing up there was nowhere much to go in Edwinstowe. That the nothing made it ripe for stories. It was a picture-book place outsiders knew as the Robin Hood village. Steal from the rich, give to the poor. Their childish hearts were tense bows, tongues rolling happily ever after, and the men they knew were fathers and uncles who tunneled into the earth, rose with blossoms of coal. Only as teenagers had they learned that the enemy was Thatcher, and then only later, for some, had it become apparent that their fathers and uncles did not rise. They stooped in soot and glazed out over beers to the FC playing. They were men who knew their days down below were numbered and still carried on, though the strikes had failed.
To Jeremy, it seemed bleak, but still, what he had told her, or rather because he was who had told her, it rang ascendant to Alexandra. And so when he invited Alexandra to his parents’ house in Northern England for dinner, her lips spread and her hands went moist in her pockets, the invitation plump with anagrams of regular fairy tales.
That afternoon in Edwinstowe, Alexandra knew she wanted Mrs. Allsworth to like her when Mrs. Allsworth talked about her in the third person. “Carl, we’ve got company,” she said, gesturing to Alexandra. “Turn off the telly.” Later, it was about the silverware. “Carl, we’ve got company. The good silver, if you will.” The house was small and warm like a toaster oven. For a while, Mrs. Allsworth fussed around the kitchen roughly with thick, efficient arms as Mr. Allsworth, Carl, looked at Alexandra shyly. Anyone could tell he wasn’t used to shaking hands with women. He moved a chair for her to sit down and then paced when he didn’t know what to do with himself.
Round sheaths of pink ham on their plates, they drank whole milk, talking over a bouquet of wildflowers. There was an assumption fat amongst them, she thought, a lengthy romantic habit suggested in turns. “I don’t follow politics anymore because I want peace,” Mrs. Allsworth said, “but Carl follows politics because he wants peace too. That’s everything you need to know about marriage.”
“That’s everything you need to know about their marriage,” said Jeremy.
“He’s the polite child, if you can believe that,” Mrs. Allsworth said.
“Shane was the bad one,” Jeremy said.
Mrs. Allsworth dropped more green beans on his plate. “A bad one.”
“Don’t listen to a word she says,” Jeremy said. “She’s very sly.”
The afternoon glided on, frictionless, as Alexandra teased Jeremy with questions directed at Mrs. Allsworth and Carl. She could see that they came to like her too when she asked them about their boy. Speaking of him in the third person linked them beyond Jeremy. She looked at them, wondered aloud if, as she suspected, he’d always been best in class, copping extravagant paranoia, good-natured chicanery. The Nottingham Forest spread nearby, ancient and mythic and real, but it was inside where Alexandra wanted to remember everything. Dish of butter. Brown bread. Lace on Mrs. Allsworth’s dress. She had never sat at a table with a family that she wanted to photograph.