The English American (13 page)

“Exactly!”

“Exactly!”

Walt looks at me, squinting.

“You remind me so much of myself at your age. I want the Iraq war to end as much as you do, kiddo. You’re right to call it a terrible war.”

I think of the number of times Dad has shushed me when I’ve tried to engage people in the subject of politics over Sunday lunch at Little Tew. Then I try to picture Walt sitting at the lunch table at Little Tew. I can’t.

At about one o’clock in the morning, we leave and take a taxi to my car, which is parked outside his hotel. He holds my hand in the taxi. I feel his strength running through his hand into mine. Running through my hand into me.

I hand him the letter I first wrote to the adoption agency, explaining how important it was to me to meet my birth parents, and drive home, feeling terribly sad that he’s going away again the next day.

I
WAKE UP AT THE CRACK OF DAWN
,
give Walt a little time to sleep, and arrive at his hotel at 8:40 ready to drive him to the airport. He is already in the lobby. Before saying good morning, he hands me his plane ticket and says, “Go upstairs to my room and do whatever you have to do to have the airline defer my return trip to Washington until tomorrow.”

The weight of sadness lifts, I fly up the stairs, happier than I have ever been, and call Virgin Atlantic. The woman says they’ll have to charge him to change the ticket.

“But you can’t!” I say. “He’s only staying the extra day because he’s my father and we need some more time together. We haven’t seen each other since I was born, when he held me in the hospital, before I was given up for adoption, which I was, a few days later, only I didn’t go straight to my parents, I went to a foster home first, though he didn’t know that…” I explain the situation to the lady at Virgin Atlantic, who waives the fee and bumps Walt up to first class.

We walk off arm in arm to Tootsies for breakfast. I show him a few pictures of Billie from my visit. He looks at each one once, filled with emotion. He doesn’t say much. He hands them back to me and says, “Thank you.”

When I tell Walt about Miles he says, “good.”

“You weren’t really in love with him, were you, Pippa?”

“He started growing on me,” I say.

Walt is peering at me from behind his glasses.

“Gro-wing on you?” he says, slowly.

“You don’t understand,” I say.

“I do,” he says.

“No, you don’t,” I say. “You don’t understand what it’s like to be too frightened to let yourself really fall in love, because then—”

“Because then you might be left,” he says. “And it would hurt way too much. To be abandoned by someone who really mattered.”

“Yes, goddammit!”

Walt’s very still. I’m not sure, but I think he might be trying not to cry.

“There are heroes in the world,” he says, “believe me. Don’t settle for anything less.”

“Are there?” I say.

“Courage, kid. You have courage. You will know.”

“Yes,” I say. “I will. One day. Hopefully you’re right.” I want to believe him.

“I am right,” he says. And then, “There can be no courage without fear.”

After breakfast we go to Sloane Square. I ask him what his favorite songs are.

“The Lady is a Tramp” is one of them, he says.

I start: “I’ve wined and dined on Mulligan stew and never wished for turkey…” He starts singing too. We carry on as we start walking down the King’s Road. There’s a strong wind blowing. We sing into it.

“Oh boy,” he says, “the energy level is on its way up.”

I thought it was just me who got surges of irrepressible energy. But no! Battling against the wind, we sing, while walking, for a quarter of a mile. Then I start singing “My Favorite Things” just as we’re getting to Man in the Moon pub.

“Stop,” he says. He looks at me, stunned.

“What is it?” I say. He speaks slowly, emphasizing his words. “That is the song Billie sang the night we met. We were walking around New York City in the snow. I kept leading her into doorways and kissing the snowflakes off her face…” He’s obviously feeling something painful, so I stop.

“Come on!” I say. “You’re in London! Let’s go to the top of a double-decker bus!”

We climb up the stairs to the bus and sit, like children, leaning against the rails at the front.

Unlike Billie, Walt wants to know everything about me. And he really listens.

“It’s so difficult,” I say. “Because Dad is my father. Mum and Dad are my parents. That is what it has been. And yet. And yet. And yet they tell me to be sensible, beg me to get a ‘proper’ job, which I can’t do, not without dying inside. And I love them, but I feel in here that you are my father. My God. You are my father.”

I feel something lift.

“You’re a good listener,” I say.

“No, I’m not,” he says. “I’m a talker. But if I don’t listen to you—well I want to know all about you. It’s the only way I can find out.” Later, he says, “I didn’t expect this. I expected to feel a quiet affection.”

“It’s not a quiet affection, is it?” I say.

“No,” he says. “It’s not.”

We drive to Kew so I can show him my flat.

“Have you ever thought of spending time in the States?” Walt says.

“Not really,” I say. “I mean, apart from fridges with ice-makers, what have you got that we haven’t?” It’s a weak joke, but he’s going, and I’m feeling sad again.

“You’re living in a country where success and enthusiasm are frowned on,” Walt begins. “That will, eventually, destroy someone like you.”

“That’s not true.”

“It is,” Walt says. “And you know it. Come to America, kid. In America, you can be who you are.”

I grin at him. “Whoever the hell that is, now Billie and you have been thrown into my mix.”

“We’ve always been in your mix.”

We climb up the steps to the flat. The postman has arrived. I pick up the airmail envelope.

“This must be from Billie,” I say. My address is written in Billie’s trademark bold red ink.

I read the letter quickly and hand it to Walt so he won’t feel left out. It’s a short letter telling me she misses me and can’t wait to hear all about my meeting with my father, about whom, she says, she has been dreaming again. At the bottom she has drawn a large red heart with the initials
B
and
P
in the center, surrounded by
x
’s.

Walt’s hand shakes as he reads it. I say nothing. Then I ask him if he’d like to see what Billie wrote just before I was born, about the two of them, the letter I received five months before.

“No. I can’t,” he says.

I show him a photograph of Mum and Dad. “I feel so grateful to those dear people,” he says, looking at it. His eyes are moist. “So very, very grateful.”

Walt says he’d love to read my plays and sits on the sofa, drinking a mug of lumpy Horlicks. I kneel on the floor, watching him closely as he reads the part of the nineteen-year-old secretary in my first play. He speaks in a high-pitched voice, with an appalling British accent.

The play is called
Odd Behaviour
. It’s about two social misfits and a middle-class couple who set up a company designed to remove odd behavior from the streets of London.

He laughs and laughs and laughs. At the end of it he looks at me and says, “My God, you’ve only picked the most important theme of our time. You’re the real stuff, kid.”

He says again that, now he’s read it, the play definitely proves I’m a conservative. It doesn’t at all. It’s a play about individuality under threat. We banter back and forth about it, but I know he thinks it’s really good. I know he’s not just being kind, I know he’s excited by it. And the specific tightness in my chest that comes from a fear that Mum and Dad are right, that I am deluding myself about wanting to be a playwright, loosens a bit more. I love him for reading it with me. And for laughing.

“Are you writing anything at the moment?”

“Well, yes—I’m trying to finish a play I started a few years ago.”

“What’s it about?” he asks.

“Well, there are these two characters. Talking to each other. In a womb. They’re twins, obviously.”

“Twins?”

“Yes, twins.”

He’s looking at me intensely.

“It’s called
Womb Mate.
” I wait for him to laugh; I thought that was a clever title. I’m fossicking around in the box, trying to find page five when, in a quiet, insistent tone of voice Walt says, “Did they tell you?”

“Who?”

“The adoption people…anyone…”

“What?” The pages collated into some kind of order, I look up. Walt looks old suddenly.

“Did they tell you about your twin?”

The air in the room has changed. I can’t hear anything. Then I can. I sit down. My body is tense.

“I have a twin?”

“No,” he says slowly. “You had a twin.”

“I had a twin.” I repeat his words because I want to be sure I heard him correctly. Walt’s voice, when he finds it, is gentle.

“He died, Pippa. In childbirth.”

I had a twin. And he died. In childbirth. The sorrow is instant. It flows into my heart like thick black ink. Walt’s voice seems far away.

“Billie’s never talked about him since. I think she’s blocked it out.”

I’m back in the room with Walt, numb now. Walt’s eyes are full of tears.

“The last time I saw you was a few moments after you were born. Billie was under. She’d become hysterical, so they gave her drugs to calm her down. I held you first. You were fiercely beautiful and so tiny. And so brave. You’d just lost your twin, and you were about to lose your parents. You were wrapped up in a hospital blanket. When I held you in my arms, I knew that giving you away meant giving away part of my soul.”

Walt’s voice comes in and out. My mind is focused on my twin. I had a twin. I had a twin. So I wasn’t alone in there.

Walt is somewhere else, too. I come back to him as he talks. I’m with Walt now, in the hospital. He is a young man. I am a newborn, staring up at him.

“I held you tight, then I looked you in the eyes. Then I brought your little ear to my mouth, and I made you a promise. ‘When you need me,’ I whispered, ‘if you need me, however many years from now, whatever I am doing, no matter what battle I am fighting, I will come to you.’

“Then I kissed you on the head and handed you back to the nurse and on to God only knew where.

“Then I walked past the room where Billie was lying in her drugged sleep, and down the brightly lit corridor into the nearest empty room, a small room at the end where they draw blood. And I closed the door and sat on a gray plastic chair opposite a clock with a crack in it, until the morning.”

We sit, saying nothing, for two, maybe three minutes.

“Nobody told me I had a twin who died. But I knew. I must have done. That must be why I’ve been writing about it…here,” I say. Trembling, I hand Walt the script of my play.

“Read this,” I say, turning to the final page. “Please.”

As it ends, only one of the two characters is left onstage. Walt reads the narrator’s final words aloud. His voice sounds far away again.

“I hear a voice crying in the wind. It is the voice of my brother, drowning in a pool.”

We sit for half an hour on the edge of my bed, on the multicolored blanket Dad bought me when he visited Lesotho, saying nothing.

Walt’s packing his luggage in his tiny pink hotel room. His flight leaves in three hours.

“Don’t ever do anything that doesn’t feel right because other people tell you you should. Trust yourself,” he says. He keeps saying it. “You’re the real stuff, kid.” And then “Courage, kid. You’re a warrior, kid. Courage.”

We drive to the airport. My parking is terrible. I get the time wrong. We’re two hours early. We check him in and then drive to the Green Man pub. I buy him some pork scratchings, a packet of prawn cocktail crisps, which he absolutely loves, and a ploughman’s lunch. He eats everything but the pickled onion.

On our way back to the car, I sneak six packets of prawn cocktail crisps into the side of his bag and manage to zip it up without him noticing.

“I thought about you so much over the years,” Walt’s saying. “Wondering.”

“Wondering what?” I say.

“When I held you in the hospital, just after you were born, I thought I saw something in your eyes that I’d not seen before.”

“What?”

“My spirit, Pippa. For the past twenty-eight years, I’ve wondered if the child I gave away was the one child of mine who had inherited my spirit.”

“And am I?” I say.

“God, yes.”

Everything I hoped to find in my reunion with Billie, I have found in my reunion with this man. For the first time in my life I feel recognized. Validated. By someone who reminds me of me.

“Why are you crying?” he says.

“I’ve just found you and now you’re going away on an airplane,” I say.

“I will never go away again,” he says. “I will always be here for you. Home,” he says, laughing, “is somewhere where they have to take you in.”

I withdraw instantly. “But you mustn’t ever out of some sense of obligation, just to be kind or anything…” I begin, but, as I say it, I realize this is an old insecurity speaking that has no place here. That will, in time, go away. I know that this man is filled with the happiness I am full of.

“No unauthorized crying,” Walt says as we wander toward customs. “You see, there are other people like you in the world,” he says.

“I love you,” he says. “I love the way you light up a room when you walk into it. You’re a warrior. I love you, kid. Remember, there can be no courage without fear.”

I
TELL
N
ICK EVERYTHING
.
He replies immediately.

And then, later, Billie calls and offers me a job, starting in the new year. She tells me she wants to spend a lot more time in Georgia to write and be near her father. If I will come to Art Buddies and help with the promotional side of things, it will free up her time to do just that.

“We don’t have a lot of money, but you can work for me in return for room and board, and we’ll pay you when we can.”

I think of my dwindling bank balance.

“Billie, I’m not sure I can afford to do this.”

“Oh, but you can.” Billie’s excited now. “Daddy told me that if you come to America he’ll give you the second house!”

“Oh.”

I think of the little light gray wooden house on the creek, a few miles from Billie’s, that used to have tenants in it and now stands empty. You get to it by walking through trees and overgrown grass, about two hundred yards from the dirt track that, after a bumpy half-hour drive, leads to the nearest store. I picture myself working at the farm next door, stripping tobacco in the barn, with only dim memories of the days when I dated men who had all their front teeth.

“Billie, that’s very nice of him, but I really don’t think he should give me the house.”

“If your grandfather wants to give you the house, he’ll give you the house! It should bring in at least thirty thousand dollars, if you sell it. That way you’re covered until we can afford to pay you.”

Her enthusiasm is contagious.

“I do still have some money left on my credit card—and if I was sure I’d eventually be able to pay it off, perhaps I could afford another plane ticket.”

“Honey, I’m offering you a job and a free place to stay just outside New York City. I really don’t think you can turn this down. You’ll be perfectly placed to pursue any creative endeavor you want. And you’ll only be four hours away from your father.”

When Charlotte calls and tells me she wants to sell the flat, I take it as a sign.

“But what about your career in advertising?” Dad says, when I tell him.

Wanting to put his mind at rest, I tell him Billie’s job comes with a proper salary, and that she’s not going to be there much anyway. Most of the time she’ll be in Georgia, so I’ll hardly see her.

“And Dad, if it doesn’t work out—and of course it might not—at least I’ll have a proper title on my CV,” I say, running as far as I can with it.

“It does sound like a good opportunity,” Mum says.

“Yes,” Dad says eventually. “I suppose it does.”

My instinct is screaming at me so strongly to go, it drowns out the guilt I feel. Almost.

Christmas and New Year will come as they always do with the usual round of drinks parties, present giving, and Scottish dancing. And no one will say anything more about it.

The night before I leave, I will get a two-line e-mail from Nick.