Sea Change (15 page)

‘You did these today?’ he says, calmly.

‘This afternoon.’

‘Very revealing,’ he quips, looking at two more sketches, just of her breasts this time, darkly shaded around the nipples.

Rhona leans forward. ‘I like those,’ she says, cheekily. ‘Do you?’

‘You’re quite a tease, aren’t you?’

‘My finest feature.’

He closes the book. ‘I like the Suffolk churches,’ he says, with a smile, not quite managing to shake the fantasy he’d had of her, while she played the piano, of taking her to his cabin.

Rhona reaches for a hipflask from her bag. ‘You mind?’ she says, in a slightly challenging tone. It’s clearly a secret from her mother. She takes a long deep swig from it, and puts it back in her bag. ‘Rum,’ she says, popping a mint into her mouth to mask the smell.

‘Are you married?’ Rhona asks.

‘Why d’you ask?’

She’s being casual, but there’s a hint of a natural flirtation too. ‘Most men your age are hitched.’

‘Just how old do you think I am?’

‘You could look younger, if you cared more.’

‘I’m separated,’ he says, hating the word and its association with failure. Of damaged goods.

‘It happens.’

‘Yes. It does.’

‘Any children?’

That’s the question Guy dreads, in fact, has dreaded every time it’s been asked in the last five years. Any children? Yes, but no. What can he say? How can he possibly answer this? That he has a father’s heart, but that he isn’t a father any more? Being a father is complicated, it can’t be so easily undone. There’s a reason there’s no word for when you are a father no more.

‘No. I don’t,’ he says, with a helpless sense of betrayal against Freya, whose presence he still feels hauntingly by his side. Rhona looks at him watchfully, she’s picked up on something, but this time doesn’t pursue it.

‘I always pry,’ she says, humorously, ‘it’s one of my things.’

‘And what about you? Are you with anyone?’

She laughs. ‘I’m with my mother, stupid.’

‘You know what I mean.’

She smiles widely, revealing a clean white row of teeth. A beautiful barrier. She’s very attractive. ‘Thanks for the iced tea,’ she says, before getting up and leaving the wheelhouse.

As she crosses the deck to her mother, Guy notices, ruefully, that he’s checking her figure. The small grey kilt seems to reveal more than it hides, or at least promises that. She has smooth-skinned legs and thin ankles. Two half-moons of dryness on the backs of her heels - skin that would soften up over the winter. A lightness to her walk he’s long since lost. Her back tapers gracefully. She probably knows it too. He sees the faint knuckles of her spine as she bends to climb the saloon roof, and between the shoulder blades, there’s the smallest glisten of sweat. The hair is lovely, he thinks, the way those brown curls - coppery in this after-storm light - hang spring-like on her shoulders, making their own little patterns of shade across her back. Oh boy. He’s decided: once that tide rises, he should go.

Position: Waiting for the tide. At the desk. Late.

Georgia has surprised him, it’s so wooded. As soon as the hills started it had reminded him of England, Northern England, with a smell of dampness and soil which felt comforting and old, like the smell of an overgrown garden. The air had cooled as they wound their way into the mountains, and the trees became thicker, taller, closer to the road, with rocky outcrops tumbling down to the verge.

After it went dark he couldn’t see how high these hills were, couldn’t see any of the landscape they drove through, in fact, just a winding road that seemed to go ever upwards, ever turning, a smooth surface as if newly poured through the mountains. And it had started to rain, heavily, making him put the wipers on full and take the corners more carefully. The rain thundered on the roof of the car and down the windscreen, washing away the super-sized Floridian insects that had met their death there, and the rain mixed with the busy rushing sound of passing streams and rivers, somewhere in the dark, in tight narrow valleys, running alongside the road.

Freya’s sitting in the front while Judy sleeps in the back. She has the road map across her lap and, unlike her mother, she’s able to pore over it without feeling sick. She gets that from him, and she also shares his love of maps - it’s enough to know precisely where you are, if not exactly where you’re going - he told her that. He can sense the woman she might be one day: supportive, friendly, never quite losing her humour. It’s comforting to think she has such a good heart.

He’s had
Rainy Night in Georgia
constantly going round in his head for the last few hours, he’s sure he hasn’t been humming it out loud, but somehow Freya’s picked up on it too, she keeps half-singing it herself, while she looks at the map. Guy thinks of his favourite line from the song, about shaking the rain from your sweater, and remembers Judy singing that same line in Fergus’s garage when the band were practising. Nice, really, that they were now in Georgia together, in the rain. Life had an elegance about it sometimes, of moments playing out you never thought would.

‘This here’s bear coun’ry,’ Freya says, looking out into the nothingness beyond the road. ‘We gonna make us a camp ’n’ cook us some bean stew.’ It’s another of her characters - this one’s based on Calamity Jane, Guy thinks, a gun-slinging force of nature. Freya saw the film last year.

Guy plays along. ‘I ain’t never seen me a bear.’

‘Then you ain’t half as man as me,’ Freya says, then laughs at her own wit, and slightly hesitates as if working out just what she’s said. ‘I think,’ she adds in her normal voice.

‘Think we’ll see one?’ Guy asks.

‘No,’ she says. ‘They don’t really exist. They’re just in fairy tales.’ Then she adds, more seriously, ‘Dad, thanks for everything.’

‘That’s kind of you to say.’

‘Are you jealous of Mum?’

‘Doing the recording?’

‘Yeah.’

‘I’ve had my share of it - over the years - she’s sung to me more than anyone else. I’ve always loved her singing.’

‘Right,’ she says, wistfully enough for him to glance at her. It’s a dangerous thing these women have: intuition. Sometimes they don’t even know it themselves, can’t access it when they want, but they look to the side and it’s there, like a second watchful face. He wants to know more.

‘How do you think she feels about it?’ he asks, casually.

‘She’s scared, Dad.’

‘Scared?’ It’s not a word he associates with Judy. ‘In what way?’

‘Of failing. I think it’s made her really scared.’

‘You’re a good observer,’ he says, encouragingly. ‘Has she said this to you?’

‘Sort of,’ she says, with a hint of backtracking. She’s trying not to be disloyal. ‘I shouldn’t - you know . . .’ she says, trailing off.

‘You’re all right,’ he says. ‘You and I have always talked, haven’t we, I mean as equals. It’s important - and it’s important for your mum to know we love her - we’re there for her.’

It’s too much. He’s lost Freya, lost her openness and he feels stupid for pushing it. Rashly, he continues in the same vein, asking her how
she
is,
really
. He gets nothing, but is left with the sense that something’s wrong - something’s wrong with his family - the invisible threads that hold it in one piece.

The road keeps on curving upwards. Surely a crest must be reached, a watershed between those streams that end up in the Atlantic, and those going the other way, to the far off flatness of the Gulf of Mexico. All this rain falling, dividing at some point for very long and different journeys back to the ocean, the simplicity is beautiful.

They nearly pass the sign for the Amicalola Falls state park. It appears, like in a film, caught in the headlamps and streaked with rain, and then vanishes as the car turns. Guy slows and steers into the park, passing grimly wet signs for camping and picnic areas, forks and bends in the road leading to parts of the park he must avoid. It’s quite complicated, and he doesn’t want to make a mistake so late at night. They keep on driving higher, till they suddenly see the long lights of a building, far away through the night. It’s appeared like an ocean liner, wrecked on the crest of a hill, with tall windows and rows of corridors in a landscape which is otherwise completely without light.

The building keeps disappearing into black empty patches of the night as the hills get in the way, then abruptly, without warning, they are turning into a manicured car park. The slowing of the car wakes Judy, instinctively.

‘Heh. We here?’ she says.

‘Think so,’ Guy replies. ‘Freya’s been brilliant with the map.’

‘Yeah?’ she says, unimpressed. She lifts herself on to one elbow to look through the window. ‘Christ! Looks like the Overlook Hotel!’

It does. The hotel is vast, built of wood and glass in a lodge style, with an airy atrium and an empty reception desk. They take their bags in and stand there, feeling a little small and washed up by the weather and the lateness of the night. Across the lobby are collections of comfy chairs and suede sofas, and there’s a drone of a floor polisher coming from a long way off.

Judy takes it upon herself to find some staff somewhere, and she does it with remarkable efficiency - every inch the bank manager’s daughter - shepherding a tall greying man to the reception and making him find a room for them. He looks at them through glasses half-way down his nose, and smiles gently, apologizing for the dreadful weather. It doesn’t bother Guy. He loved the smell of the mountain air as he crossed the car park, full of the scent of pin oak and hickory. They make air fresheners of this kind of thing.

His excitement continues as they walk the long corridors to their room, through a hotel which seems entirely devoid of life. No sound of TVs behind the doors, no sound, in fact, of anything. Their room is high up, and through the huge plate-glass window of their bedroom there is nothing but an emptiness, a black nothing across the hills and forest that he knows is outside.

A few minutes later, miraculously, there’s a polite knock on the door, and a tray of burgers is brought in. Well done, Judy, you pulled that out of the hat.

They sit round a low coffee table and scoff the food in a noisy silence, punctuated by their too rapid swallowing and licking of fingers. Their elbows jostle one another for the pile of communal fries on a plate in the centre. Freya’s very capable of matching him, fry for fry, that’s a recent development. It’s family at its most vulgar and without inhibition - the kind of thing he’s watched on a natural history programme, like those miserable hyenas, dragging and tearing at some poor rotten thing, their heads emerging wild-eyed with excitement. He dips the bun in the sauce, eats the wet garnish, licks the salt and animal grease from his fingers. Nothing like being hungry, he thinks, nothing like it at all - eating late and knowing you deserve it, it’s about the best thing life can deliver.

They go to sleep exhausted - he’s much more settled than he had been at the motel, the night before. This truly feels like an arrival and, outside, a sense that there is something huge and empty and full of wonder, the state park, Georgia, America, a journey, it’s tremendous.

As he falls asleep, he thinks of the black bears out there, hundreds of them probably, crouching and shuffling in the forest, looking at the lights of the hotel on the crest above them, their fur as wet as carwash rollers. Unlucky bastards.

He wakes in the morning to see Freya standing at the bedroom window, the curtain pulled to one side. The room is shadowy, but a bright clean light washes in from behind her, it feels like a flood of cold white water pouring into the still pond which has been their sleep. Freya notices him stirring, or had been waiting for him, because she whispers, ‘Come on, Dad, come and look.’ It’s good that she wants him rather than her mother; even after all these years he seeks the affirmation that he has a special connection with her.

‘You won’t believe it,’ she whispers.

At the window he’s amazed to see a giant white void of cloud, moving fast, drifting in sharp coiling fogs around the hotel. Right below them a patch of grey grass leads out to bushes, but beyond that, where there should be one of the most impressive views of Georgia’s northern mountains, the miles of ridge and forest, the carpet of verdant green, there is nothing. It’s like they’re in the sky, rising through the clouds.

‘Wow,’ he says.

‘I’ve been up a whole hour,’ Freya says, proudly. ‘Sometimes you get these glimpses of a mountain up there,’ she points, ‘and over there,’ already an expert guide, it seems. ‘It’s amazing.’

It’s mountain light, he thinks, blinding and white and full of ozone - as if the light they’re used to, back in England, has been stained by damp soil.

While they look, a brief fringe of trees along a ridge begins to emerge, impossibly high up. Distantly the trees look like a rim of eyelashes, the cloud swirling and resealing in such a way that the ridge disappears in a downward motion, the curve of an eyelid closing.

‘Shame we can’t see them properly,’ she says.

‘Yeah. Although sometimes imagining views can be better.’

He and Freya go down to breakfast before Judy. The restaurant’s a large wooden room off the reception, again with plate-glass windows looking out into the mist and fog. An elderly waitress moves immediately toward them, a bowl of black coffee held in her hand like a bowling ball. ‘Y’all have a good night?’ she says, sweetly, and follows it up with a ‘hmm, ah-ha’ before they’ve answered. ‘Y’all hungry?’ she says, ‘ ’cause we can do something about that, ah-ha,’ and begins to move off.

Freya thinks that’s funny, and begins to imitate her the second the waitress is gone. Guy’s glad Freya’s so buoyant this morning. More and more his mood seems to be dictated by the enjoyment the others are having. That’s family, he thinks, as he sees Judy walking dreamily towards them, miles away, getting closer.

He eats a huge breakfast of grits and biscuits, salted sausage, ham, cheese and juice. He has several cups of black coffee, enjoying making a spectacle of himself in front of his girls, neither of whom can truly compete with his appetite. Freya tries, repeatedly going off to the breakfast counter in that little bouncy clumsy walk of hers, a couple of hair bands tied round her wrist, as always, but she comes back with the things Guy’s not interested in - the figs, yoghurts and grapes. He stretches to prunes, but here, faced with serving bells full of meat, biscuits and gravy, he’s got bigger fish to fry.