Girl From the South (v5) Read online

  ‘Why don’t you do it yourself?’ Gillon asked.

  He sucked his teeth. Then he tapped them with the stylus from his laptop.

  ‘Because I don’t like miniatures.’

  ‘Excuse me?’

  ‘I don’t like,’ Paul Landers said, ‘the – as it seems to me – supreme complacency of miniatures.’

  That had been three months ago. It was perhaps the first three months since Gillon’s formal education had ceased – or, to be more truthful, been abruptly cut off – that she had worked at anything consistently, conscientiously, sequentially. It suited her. She came out of the building in the evening in a state of mild astonishment that Meeting Street should still be there, going about its daily business, while she had been caught up in such another world, a world of detail but also a world of adventure and escapade. Charleston had been wealthy, sure, hugely wealthy on account of rice and indigo and cotton and slaves, but that wealth was so fragile, so perilously balanced. One Atlantic storm, the loss of a mere handful of laden ships, and down went the house of cards, leaving those perfect tiny faces she studied all day, in their ovals of pearls and gold, staring into the abyss.

  When the catalogue was done – which it almost was – Gillon was not sure what would happen. Most interns only stayed three months, very rarely six. She had been there, because of Paul, because of the catalogue, for nine. Paul had not mentioned any further projects, had not in fact talked about the future either with regard to her, or to the gallery. He was thinking about an exhibition of the Charleston portrait painter Henry Benbridge, but he hadn’t discussed it with her, only with the Director. Gillon didn’t think he was going to, either. And if he didn’t, then she was going to have to make her own plans, the kind of plans she seemed to have been making for at least ten years, plans that allowed her to escape from Charleston, and then brought her back, time after time, to yet another rundown little apartment, deliberately shunning her old bedroom in her parents’ house which was always waiting, door ajar, pillows piled on the bed, lamp on …

  ‘Find your own path,’ Mother said.

  But that was the trouble, the finding. She felt she’d looked and looked, that she’d been looking ever since she went to high school and that nothing she’d seen so far was what she’d been hoping for. There’d been flashes of illumination when her heart had leaped, but they’d only been flashes. There’d been nothing she wanted, nothing that lasted, nothing that she really recognized.

  Paul’s door was open. He had pushed his glasses up on top of his head and was squinting at a slide in a tiny cardboard frame against the light. His shirt had the air of having spent the previous night on the bedroom floor, but then, his clothes always looked like that. Maybe Adèle, his wife, whom Gillon had once met and found intimidating, took a view of marriage which did not include ironing or, indeed, taking physical care of another adult who could perfectly well take care of himself. Adèle was a musician, a modern, serious, atonal composer and violinist. Come to think of it, Adèle didn’t look very ironed either. But then – Gillon glanced down at herself – nor did she, by her mother and sister’s standards.

  ‘You’re late,’ Paul said.

  ‘Seven minutes.’

  ‘Nine. Why are you late?’

  Gillon gazed out of the window.

  ‘I – kind of couldn’t get going.’

  He put the slide down on the mess of papers on his desk. Then he pushed his glasses back down to his nose.

  ‘You aren’t a student any more.’

  ‘You know,’ she said, ‘I sort of am.’

  ‘Only because you persist.’

  ‘Persist?’

  ‘In thinking of yourself as one.’

  ‘Well,’ she said. She stood on one leg and rubbed a sneakered foot up the back of the opposite one. ‘I don’t have any money. I never do anything for more than a few months. I get on planes and then I come back. I think I’m getting away, I think I’m moving on, but what I’m really doing is going round in circles.’

  ‘Are you dating?’

  Gillon stopped rubbing her foot.

  ‘No.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘You sound just like my grandmother. What business is it of yours, anyhow?’

  Paul leaned back in his chair.

  ‘I’ve got used to you.’

  ‘So?’

  ‘You have – well – you have charm. You have originality. You aren’t the kind of girl that guys could dismiss as just another pretty girl—’

  ‘Well, thanks.’

  ‘Is that what you want?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘A guy.’

  Gillon put her foot on the floor.

  ‘Why, exactly, are we having this conversation?’

  ‘Because I was thinking about your future.’

  ‘Were you?’

  ‘It’s time you went,’ Paul said. ‘You’ve outgrown anything I can offer you here.’

  Gillon turned to face him.

  ‘I was sort of trying not to think about it.’

  ‘That’s what happens here. In fact, as an outsider, born in brash New Jersey, I’d say that that’s what happens to people in Charleston.’

  ‘I haven’t even been looking at the ads,’ Gillon said. ‘Some nights, I just lie there and wait for a big foot to come through the ceiling and squash me flat and decide things that way.’

  ‘Melodramatic.’

  ‘Sure. But kind of easy.’

  ‘Do you want easy?’

  Gillon looked at him.

  ‘No,’ she said.

  ‘What do you want, then?’

  ‘I want to know,’ she said. ‘I want to find something or someone that my mind just looks at and says, “Yes.” No messing.’

  ‘Ah.’

  Gillon put her hands flat on the nearest margin of his desk that wasn’t entirely obscured by papers.

  ‘Books used to do it. I thought I’d found the Holy Grail with almost anything I read. But it doesn’t seem to work now. I question too much.’

  ‘You know too much,’ Paul said. ‘That’s what happens when you get older.’

  Gillon straightened up.

  ‘Enough buddy stuff. You’re, well, you’re very kind. But I’m going to get to work now.’

  ‘In a minute,’ Paul said.

  Gillon felt a small clutch of apprehension. She fixed her eyes on him to see if he was going to spring on her again. ‘I’ve been on the Internet,’ Paul said.

  ‘More than I have—’

  ‘I know. I could see. Gillon—’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘There’s a job on offer in London.’

  Her shoulders sank.

  ‘London—’

  ‘Yes. London, England. Don’t look so horrified. London, England, Europe. Not Fruitland, Utah.’

  ‘Paul, I—’

  ‘It’s a research job.’

  She looked at him. She put her hands in her jeans pockets; very few people in Charleston wore jeans unless they were tourists.

  ‘It sounds interesting,’ Paul said. ‘A small conservation company. They specialize in easel work, mostly Italian Renaissance. They want someone who’s done a studio course in fine-art painting techniques.’

  ‘I’m not sure. I can’t even quite think about it—’

  ‘Because of London, England?’

  ‘I’ve never been to London.’

  ‘Then it’s time you did.’

  Gillon kicked at one foot with the other.

  ‘I don’t want to run away again.’

  ‘Run away from what?’

  ‘All the things I can’t seem to come to terms with and can’t leave behind either. Here, family, what I’d hoped for, what I seem to be instead—’

  Paul grunted. Gillon looked at him.

  ‘Thank you. Really thank you.’

  He shrugged.

  ‘Sure.’

  ‘I’m going to work now,’ Gillon said. ‘I’ll think about it.’

  ‘No, you wo
n’t,’ he said. His voice rose a little. ‘You’ll put it in the box marked “Can’t face,” like everything else.’

  She was startled.

  ‘Thank you—’

  ‘Go away,’ Paul said tiredly. ‘Go away and dig yourself another pit.’

  Gillon went out of his office and into the tiny one next to it which housed her computer and her files and a poster of La Soupe from Picasso’s Blue Period which had always seemed to her almost a holy painting.

  She sat down and looked at her computer screen. Her slightly distorted face looked back at her from the dark curved glass. She’d had a row, the week before, with her brother Cooper, who worked for an IT company. She’d accused him of being stuck in a rat race.

  ‘So?’ he’d said, smiling and maddening.

  She’d taken a deep breath.

  ‘So, even if you win the rat race, you’ll still be a rat.’

  He’d laughed. He’d loved it. He couldn’t see how emotional she was feeling, how much in earnest she was, how important she thought personal validity was. Now, she just felt empty of anything, spinning slowly in a big dusty void.

  The phone rang. She picked it up.

  ‘Gillon Stokes.’

  ‘Dear—’

  ‘Mother—’

  ‘I want you to come for supper tonight.’

  ‘Mother, I—’

  ‘I want a family supper,’ Martha said. ‘There’s a reason. Ashley and Merrill are coming. So is Cooper.’

  ‘A reason?’

  ‘You’ll know tonight—’

  ‘Mama, I’m supposed to be at the bar—’

  ‘Get someone to cover,’ Martha said. ‘Change shifts.’ She paused and then she said the kind of thing that Gillon expected from Grandmama, not her. ‘It’s family time.’

  ‘OK,’ Gillon said. She reached out her right hand and turned her computer on.

  ‘I’m glad,’ Martha said. ‘I’ll see you, dear.’ She must have been at the clinic, between patients. She’d have her bifocal glasses on and her hair pulled back into a black velvet band. Tortoiseshell-framed glasses, black velvet band, dark pants suit. Professional, reassuring, committed. Gillon sighed.

  ‘Bye, Mama,’ she said.

  Chapter Two

  Gillon’s grandmother, Sarah Alton Cutworth, had lived in the same area of Charleston all her life. Her father had been a prosperous doctor and surgeon; her mother had been her mother. She was born in the fall of 1925 in a big house on the East Battery, in her parents’ huge rice bed, its four end posts carved with bas-reliefs of rice sheaves, and with a headboard that could be removed in summer to encourage the circulation of air.

  Sarah had been the fourth child in the family and the first daughter. There was universal rejoicing at her arrival, a rejoicing that would have been no less heartfelt, but slightly less openly expressed, had the gender order of the Alton children been the other way about. She became, from the moment of her arrival, her father’s princess. One of her earliest memories was his daily arrival home from his clinics, or from seven hours of surgery, and then his carrying her out on to the second-floor piazza with its views clear across to Fort Sumter, and sitting her beside him on the joggling board while he talked to her and allowed her to play with his watch. Her brothers were encouraged to treat her with affection but also with the kind of grand and gallant protectiveness he showed towards her himself. When Dr Alton encouraged his family to act or think in a certain way, mostly they obliged. No one much questioned Daddy’s authority, least of all Sarah and her Mama.

  Childhood in the big house on East Battery was a comfortable thing. The house itself was graceful, with high-ceilinged rooms and a piazza on every floor. It was furnished with Charleston-made copies of English eighteenth-century furniture and supplied – Dr Alton was insistent about this – with bang up-to-date bathrooms equipped with shower heads the size of dinner plates. In Daddy and Mama’s bathroom, the shower was a curving half-moon structure of chrome-plated ribs which shot water out through hundreds of small holes. Mama had a modern bathtub, too, made of yellowish-green marble shipped from Italy with an angular fan-shaped mirror on the wall behind it. Sarah had been outraged when the subsequent owners of the East Battery house in the 1960s – manufacturing people from Detroit – had torn out Mama’s bathroom and replaced it with a peach-coloured tub and sink instead. Peach. Too tacky for adequate words.

  The people who came visiting to Sarah’s childhood house – all professional, all cultivated – were white. The people who looked after the house and the family in it were black. Many of the blacks came from the old Alton family plantation up the Ashley River and had looked after Sarah’s father since he was a baby and one of them, Miss Minda, had dressed Sarah herself on her wedding day and was still with her in her widowhood, fifty-five years later, grumbling round the kitchen and making, Sarah said, the lightest hot biscuits in Charleston. Dr Alton, a liberal and conscientious employer, had referred to blacks as ‘nigras’. Sometimes, in the privacy of her own thoughts and safely removed from the social opinion of her grandchildren’s generation, Sarah allowed the word to slip, without conscious prejudice, without perceived contempt, across her own mind.

  When, at the age of twenty-three, she married Teddy Cutworth at St Philip’s Episcopal Church (its arches, Daddy always said, were influenced by those inside St Martin-in-the-Fields, in London), Sarah exchanged that serene and cherished existence on the East Battery for one not very dissimilar, in a three-storey house on Legare Street. The same high ceilings, the same piazzas, the same kind of graceful garden full of magnolias and camellias and Confederate jasmine, the same round of lunch clubs and Tuesday clubs and bridge clubs and Bonheur hospital clubs. The pantry closets were full of the crystal and china that had been given as wedding presents; the tables were laid – formally, even for the two of them – with the silverware Mama had taken Sarah to choose for her trousseau; Repousse-pattern, the same as Mama had, and her mother had had before her. In her closets hung her pastel-coloured clothes with, at one end, a special section for her ball dresses, sewn into muslin bags. One of these – seafoam green – had been the dress she was wearing at the St Cecilia’s Ball (smoking forbidden, no ankles showing, no divorced women) when Teddy Cutworth had asked her to marry him. He’d gone down on one knee, even though it was 1947, and she’d known exactly what he would say. She wasn’t sure she was in love with him – it was difficult, after Daddy, to see magnificence in many men-but she was sure that she wanted to be married and sure that Teddy Cutworth could provide all that was necessary for a comfortable marriage. Besides, he was personable and amusing, he had survived a spell in Italy during the Second World War, he was a good shot, not too hard a drinker, and he had his dress shoes made in London.

  ‘Yes,’ she’d said. ‘Yes, I’ll marry you.’

  It was only later – much later – when she fell in love with a man she couldn’t have, that she realized she had made that marriage decision without really deciding at all. She had never known a life without structure, so that it seemed only natural to make the continuance of recognizable structure a priority. She was used to men, after all: she’d grown up surrounded by them and with a certainty about how to handle them. Teddy was sufficiently like her brothers in tastes and outlook to be what she thought she was looking for because it was what she knew. It was only later, lying face down on her bed in the middle of a hot, dead day, that she knew, with the anguish resulting from a courteous but distinct rejection, that she’d only been half alive, that there had been a whole dimension of her waiting to be explored, that her upbringing – for all its sweetness and security – had never allowed the shackles to be taken off her childhood wrists.

  A broken heart, she quickly learned, was not something for even the smallest kind of public display. If she’d been encouraged, she might well have done something outrageous, something socially absolutely unacceptable. She had been saved from the fate of an outcast by someone else’s good sense – a man’s good sense, she reminded her
self – and must now make amends. She must channel those energies – those terrifyingly powerful emotional energies she’d been so desperate to direct elsewhere – into motherhood and marriage and a life useful to the community. She would teach Martha – an only child without realistic hope of a sibling – the piano, she would be as supportive to Teddy as it was possible to be without a total natural commitment of the heart, and she would fling herself into work for the Preservation Society of Charleston, an organization to which Dr Alton had leant his weighty support at its foundation in 1920. Regret, bitter disappointment, longing, could all somehow be swept up into a blaze of atonement, which would, she told herself, prove its own reward and solace. The awakening from the life of the East Battery nursery had been, she decided, as crude as it was necessary, and she would ensure that her daughter had enlightened maternal support in the making of her own decisions.

  But her daughter Martha had other ideas. Although quieter, she resembled her grandfather in her intellectual capacities and in her determination to lead her own life. She submitted to schooling at Ashley Hall, but declined to enter beauty pageants – Sarah had been Queen once, with a train which alone weighed sixty-five pounds – or date the football jocks or concern herself with the perfect placing of finger bowls and shrimp forks. When Sarah talked to her, in her veiled Southern way, of following her heart, of listening to her true emotions, of not taking the first option, Martha chose to hear her in terms of a future career, rather than of a man. Martha wanted to be a physician, like her grandfather. Sarah, proud and horrified at once, fought with her own instinct about the unwomanliness of the medical profession, and begged Martha at least to consider the Medical University of South Carolina, right there in Charleston, founded in 1824, the oldest medical school in the South; why, she could study anything there and not have to move from this environment which, Sarah now firmly believed, had restored her to herself, given back a sense of purpose, of hope, of propriety.