Solsbury Hill A Novel (17 page)

“Your friend is delightful,” Gwen said.

Eleanor took a seat at the edge of one of the chairs.

“Oh, you should go to see York with Miles, Eleanor. You could drive there . . .” Gwen turned to Miles. “You have a car.” He nodded. “Then you could come home on the train, Eleanor, when you’ve seen the town. Or come back here together. York’s wonderful.” She looked back and forth between them. “With a rather famous train station. You’ll work it out.”

“We should,” Miles agreed with satisfaction.

Eleanor looked over at Mead. “So, let’s go,” she said to Miles and hooked her arm in his proffered arm.

Eleanor guided Miles out of the driveway and past the small villages she knew. “Thorpe, thwaite,” she told
him, “that’s what they call villages around here,” she said. “No, really they do!”

He’d already mentioned how good she looked, how impertinent it was to come without reaching her first, but he’d tried as long as he could, he’d insisted, and she was happy to watch the countryside go by, with Miles driving and the window rolled halfway down.

They’d been driving quietly for miles when he asked, “What’s the story with Mead?”

“Mead’s part of the family,” Eleanor answered.

“He seemed upset.” Miles was fishing.

“He was.”

“About Alice . . . ? Or was it me?”

“It’s not you.”

“You looked pretty happy coming in off that ride.”

“I was.” She glared at the side of his face. “You really want to talk about looking happy?”

He downshifted the gear stick to pick up some traction.

In time they’d talk about that night, but she was distracted. It wasn’t just a bad habit that ran in the blood; Emily had called it a curse.

“Do you remember snipe hunts?” she asked Miles after a long road of silence.

“What brought that up?”

“Do you remember them?”

“I don’t think I ever went on one. Did you?”

“Yep.” She nodded. “Once at camp. I mean, I wasn’t the
worst fool. I knew it was fake, but everyone kind of went along and there were a couple of kids who took it seriously and they were the ones who wound up crying when it was obvious—you know, eventually it gets kind of obvious there’s no such thing as a snipe, after the sun’s gone down and you’ve these bags in your hands with marshmallows on a hook to catch them.”

“What are you saying, exactly?”

The woolly sheep sometimes seemed to smile when they watched the cars go by. Eleanor wondered if they knew what a rarity they were, in the big world.

“The older kids are in the trees making snipe sounds and telling you to run this way then that way. It’s sometimes what it’s been like, being here. Starting with that night I walked in on you, really. A rite of passage, more like a hazing . . .” Her voice trailed off.

Miles pulled over to the side of the road and parked, stretched his arm across the back of her seat, rested his hand on her shoulder, and she flinched.

“You’re not comfortable, I know,” he said. “It was wrong to just show up.”

She glanced at him, then out the window. “I don’t want to talk about serious things yet.”

Having him next to her, she began to see the tapestry of things take shape. Threads hanging that hadn’t been woven in. The man in her mother’s letters, Martin Garrens, might still be in Scarborough, for one thing. She could hunt for
Emily’s letters in the house, see if they were there somewhere after all, see what was in them. She wanted to find out what it meant that Mead had his own land somewhere, what he made of what had happened with his father, and why he didn’t live there. Not that she wanted him to live there.

Here was Miles sitting beside her with his long legs under the dashboard, his body relaxed. Her hand on the gear shift knob so that when he wanted to, he could touch her. A major thread in the warp and weave was the sense of betrayal she felt when she left New York, when she landed in England. They needed to talk about that. But right now, she just felt this wave of weariness. She reached for his hand and said, “You know, Miles, in time I’m going to want to know how that happened. Why it happened. How planned it was. I’m hoping it was more like spontaneous and less like planned, but in either case I want you to tell me the truth. I don’t want to talk about it now, but sometime before you leave, I guess, we have to talk about why you went there.”

“Eleanor, it was . . .”

“But not now.” She raised the window. “You know, when I got home that night, I broke all those dishes. It was probably the morning by then, ’cause I’d stopped at Soho House and gone up to the pool.”

His head turned to look at her face. “You did?”

She nodded. She knew where he was going in his head. “I thought about stripping down to my bra and pants and swimming in that pool up there. On the way up, in the elevator, I
saw it all exactly as it should have been. Some hot late-night drunk swim. But the reality was I had a sad solo drink at the bar and went back downstairs and got a cab home alone. Anyway, that’s when I broke all those dishes.”

“You mean the Italian ones?” She’d piggybacked onto a business trip he’d taken to Milan, and they’d chanced upon a little shop with lovely, quirky, hand-painted pottery.

“Yep.”

“Tell me it’s not so . . .”

“It hurts, eh?” she said.

Miles put his hand on the back of her neck.

The countryside rolled by and Miles commented on it, mile after mile. Smooth, sweet green on the side of the road, green that rose, green that rolled, green that sometimes rolled so high they lost sight of the sky. There were times that trees closed in on either side of the road, as through Stoney Haggs Rise, and then cleared to another endless stretch of green, dabbed with white sheep from Uncleby Hill, past and through some unappealing and modern-patched towns, till they pulled into York and found a car park.

Whip ma Whop ma Gate
—they passed a broad street sign that marked where the local whipping post had once been placed and walked down that narrow street to the church nearby and then down the shadowed street called the
Shambles and into the Juicy Moosey, where she ordered a large Well Being and he a Green Peace.

The buildings bent into each other and kept the lanes in shadow for most of the day. Narrow streets and passageways built for little people—half the size of Eleanor and Miles—a thousand years ago. Down the Shambles to Little Shambles, around a bend, then back again. The store windows were low to the ground and the doorways so low that Eleanor and Miles had to stoop to pass through them. Through a break in the wall they followed a sign to Newgate Market, a dank passage of stones and bricks on the other side of which lay an open square, a bustling market. It was nice to wander in a city neither of them knew. York was a quaint town and strange enough, to each of them, that they held hands moving through it.

The bistro, which had a very good chef according to Miles’ phone, wasn’t warm in its decor but had a mix of aromas that were appealing. Miles held her elbow in his hand as the host escorted them to the table. He slipped her coat off her shoulders and said how pretty she looked in the skirt to her knees, the tailored Chanel and printed scarf. He pulled out her chair and touched the back of her neck where it was bare between the scarf and her hair in a full French twist held with a clip and not her glasses. Eleanor crossed her legs at the knees as Miles ordered red wine.

With a gesture that was very Miles, he ran his fingers
through the front swath of his thick hair. He’d done it the first time she saw him as she approached him on the playground when they were in the sixth grade. When he’d seen her coming toward him that day, he’d dropped the basketball he was dribbling and had run his hand through the thick hair to pull it off his forehead where it always fell. He always kept it long enough that it would fall there.

“El,” he said.

“Don’t be nervous,” she said.

“I am nervous. Are you not nervous?”

“I am, but it would be better if
you
weren’t.”

“I’d no business just coming up, without calling, but I did leave messages.”

“I know.”

“I came to see you.”

“I know.”

“I was just at the hotel and . . .”

“Pacing,” she said. He paced when a big deal was pending, and he paced when he watched the news.

“Thanks for making it easy when I got there. I know I interrupted something.”

Eleanor looked down at her hands and they sat quietly.

“You seem different, you know?”

“I’m sure I am.”

The sommelier arrived with the wine and uncorked the bottle. Not a fan of silencing conversation for the performance of serving a meal, she asked how she seemed different.

“More mature, I think.”

“More mature.” She took her first swallow, invited him to elaborate.

“More steady?”

“I’m probably more confused.”

“I was going to say more full. In French they’d say ‘good in your skin.’”

“Ah.” A wave of tiredness overcame her and her eyelids actually weakened, drooped. A shot of a headache right above her left ear. “Well, I can tell you one thing. I can tell you one thing for sure. Without you, I’ve kind of had to pull things together, and I didn’t know how much you were doing for me before.”

“Before when?”

“Before now, before always. Since forever. It’s true. I think I realized it when I was flying here. Halfway across the ocean, what it was like to not have you there. Not just not next to me in a seat, but anywhere.”

She could feel how he wanted to assure her that he was there, that he was right here, that he was always there, would always be there, and she appreciated that he didn’t say it. She appreciated that he said, “Go on, I want to hear.”

The headache was like a bolt in her temple. She forced herself to take a deep breath. “I don’t know if I have the energy for it.”

“That’s okay.” Miles was still in a straightforward sense of time and place. She had been there, or somewhere near to
that, all of her life. But she wasn’t there any longer. She wasn’t sure she ever would be again. Having seen what she’d seen and felt what she’d felt, even just the strength it took to stand against the wind on the moors, to feel the wildness of nature pushing against her, she had doubts about what mattered and what was real. She’d been invited to be brave enough to know things, to discover things about ancestry, to know herself sincerely.

“Grazing menu,” he said. “How about if we order a few things to share?”

“That always works.” She spoke softly.

“Smoked eel, Whitby crab.” He looked to her for approval. “Rabbit pie and mash, fish and chips, ‘unusual carrots.’”

“We have to have ‘unusual carrots,’ right? Taste these. They’re good.” She split and buttered a roll for him.

“Jeez, it almost hurts more that you’re being so good to me, El. Can you tell me how awful it was? Can you kick me under the table right in my shin, even by accident?”

“Wow, that’s extreme.” They had a brief laugh and then she got serious. “Yeah, I’m sure I can tell you. I went to Soho House hoping to do something awful that night. Our friend at the door assumed you were there and let me in. I was . . . I don’t even know what I was feeling. If you’d come by that night, I could have shown you. It was awful, what I felt. I’d never felt anything like it.” She took a long sip of wine. “Actually, it’s not true I hadn’t felt it before. Do you remember how cut off my dad was after Mom died?”

This was the harshest thing she could say, though she hadn’t exactly intended it that way. It fell out. Onto the table and there it sat.

“It was like that?” he said. “It was worse than that. I hurt you worse than that.”

“As you know I’ve got a mind that’s good at not thinking about what’s just awful. Right?”

“I didn’t mean to. It wasn’t about you . . .”

“I know. I really do know that.” Her voice sounded high and young. She felt how vulnerable she would be if she bothered to ask more. “I mean, I sort of know, but that last day we were together, did you know you were seeing her? Miles, it’s not just what you did, it’s what I saw.”

“Oh, God, I know.” He exhaled. His body cringed he was so uncomfortable.

“Did you lie to me about where you were going that night?”