16

I am a stranger in a strange land. As much as I love England, apart from the soggy winters, I know I will always be a stranger; I will spend my entire life on this island peering into other’s lives from outside. Perhaps that’s just what writers do, anyway.

But at least living in the UK expands your vocabulary with words like “bedsit” and “chunder” and phrases like “two up two down.” There’s that.

I still don’t know offhand the difference between icing sugar and powdered sugar, or my way around frosting and butter icing and royal icing and just plain icing, not to mention caster sugar, and whether you pronounce scones as “scons” or “scoans”—the British don’t seem sure of that one, either (Will’s mother pronounced it “scons,” so we can probably take that as gospel). Then there are muffins and crumpets; there are cookers and stoves and ovens. These are just the problems I’ve had in the kitchen. The universal language of love is not, I’ve found, all that universal.

Celsius versus Fahrenheit, millimeter versus ounce—once you’ve got that down, as well as the wardrobe, particularly the shoes, you’re a native. The accent is harder to pass off and I never wanted to join the pretentious who try to adopt the posh version. Even trained actors fail here; we’ve all heard some calamitous bits of miscasting on the silver screen. This crosses both ways: I kept wondering why Rosamund Pike kept sneering and whining through her nose throughout Gone Girl until I realized that’s how we sound to the British.

Will had the most desirable accent of all; he went to Eton. And he had the hair—mountains of thick wavy hair cut in that voluminous, floppy Etonian way. They all look alike, these boys of privilege: they talk alike, they walk alike, they talk about all the same things, and the best-trained actor can’t begin to imitate them.

Will told me something of his life at Eton, which I gathered was not always a laugh riot. That constant if unstated pressure to be better-than, which pressure I understood completely. The fact that showing weakness was never allowed, even though you were just a kid of thirteen. You had to be a man. I felt a bit sorry for Will, hearing this. This was before I knew about pity, how it can be confused with love, and how dangerous that is.

Apart from that sense of being an alien, the real problem I had in Weycombe was that I was bored, depressed, and down on myself for being made redundant (that lovely British euphemism meaning canned, your key card confiscated, your computer locked). Although for a while there I’d enjoyed my freedom. Early on I literally ran about the house hugging myself (once Will was safely on his way to the train station), so happy I didn’t have to trail along beside him in heels, clutching my leather tote with its laptop and iPhone and all the toys grown-ups play “business” with. None of that for me, the pointless shuffling of papers and creating new problems to solve. I was going to make money on my own terms, answering only to myself.

But doing what, exactly?

I only wanted to write and I kept circling back to that.

Write what? That I didn’t know.

It is possible recent experience with Will contributed to my utter inability to write erotica but I didn’t want to think too much about that. I did try writing a Regency romance, but that stalled out at fifty pages.

How did these superwomen do it? The ones who found time away from playdates and diaper changes to do something dynamic and financially rewarding inside the home, avoiding the commute, pausing only long enough to be interviewed over Skype about their amazing success. I didn’t even have the excuse of childrearing to fill the hours that began to stretch from ten a.m., when I returned from my daily walk, to five p.m., when I would start to cook dinner. Or three p.m., when I might sometimes have a glass of wine. Will wanted to wait to have children “until we were more settled.” Something told me not to push too hard on that subject. What if I asked him point-blank and his answer was no, never—or worse, not with you? I want children but not with you?

What else was there to engage me, then? Writing a memoir? My memoirs would fill at best a few paragraphs: I, Jillian Anna Violet White, was born with an ability to memorize almost anything you put in front of me. Any scene, any page. That was my one gift, my ticket to a scholarship at Wellesley.

Nothing in my childhood had prepared me for life with blue-blooded Will. My parents briefly separated when I was fifteen and my mother and I went to live with my grandmother, who was the antithesis of upper crust. In my memory she is always in her lavender stretch pants from Sears with a starched white top tucked into the elastic waist. She dotted vanilla extract behind her ears for scent and always looked clean and neat and dirt poor. I tried to picture my grandmother sitting in Will’s mother’s tufted sitting room and it was impossible.

She was for me an oasis of sanity. She lived in Virginia, in the sort of little town that made you think of endless summers and apple pies and white wicker rockers on the front porch. It had rows of nineteenth-century houses and shops; to kids from the nearby farms it was the Big City. The last time I went to see her was just before the Parkinson’s took hold and she found it difficult to walk or talk. The conversation, as usual, turned to my brother. Which is kind of why I started avoiding her. She got morbid in her old age, paranoid and rambling, turning on people. Turning on me. The doctor said that was a normal part of the disease, only to be expected.

I’d been brought up on or around military bases stretching from California to New Hampshire, living with a constant background hum of jets flying overhead. It made me feel safe, knowing someone was always patrolling the skies on my behalf, especially since no one on the ground could really be bothered.

Then my father retired and moved us to Maine, in what was clearly a midlife overreaction to the rules and regulations of military life. It was at this point he began falling apart, becoming enamored of hunting and little else. Without someone to tell him what to do and when to do it, he was lost, and what really pissed him off, I think, was finding how hopeless he was at life. My mother was not strong enough to fill the void or create the structure that he needed. My grandmother tried but she was too far away. She’d send these little care packages, tins of homemade cookies cushioned in popcorn.

My father began to drink once he retired. Or maybe he’d never stopped and it just became more apparent he was drunk once he was underfoot all the time. I suppose it is just possible he was on his face all day on the job and nobody noticed. Because he was in intelligence—the irony, I know—they did random drug testing on all those guys. But my dad was in charge of his squadron and maybe it never occurred to anyone to test the boss. If that makes you sleep less well tonight, knowing someone with his finger on the button might be drunk off his ass, well—yeah. It should.

I had to get out or turn into them, into my parents. That fear guided my every move.

My looks helped. I was aware of that from about junior high on, once I’d shed my ugly duckling carapace. But it was my brains that got me out of Dodge.

My looks don’t matter to my story, except that without them, Will would never have noticed me, I would never have married my titled almost-prince, and I would never have had Weycombe to write about. If it matters to posterior, as Macy would say, I had brown hair falling past my shoulders and light brown eyes, and a heart-shaped face with a widow’s peak. I carried just 125 pounds on a five-foot-seven-inch frame, although under stress I weighed less. At the time Anna died, my Bugs Bunny pajama bottoms were barely clinging to the tops of my hips, and I knew I’d probably have to go to the next size down.

I wondered if the local lingerie shop, Intime, carried Bugs Bunny PJs.