Three Junes
Contents
For Alec and Oliver, my extraordinary sons
Assuming that our energies are sufficient, love is interminable.
—
JIM HARRISON,
The Road Home
Three Junes
Collies
1989
ONE
P
AUL CHOSE GREECE
for its predictable whiteness: the blanching heat by day, the rush of stars at night, the glint of the lime-washed houses crowding its coast. Blinding, searing, somnolent, fossilized Greece.
Joining a tour—that was the gamble, because Paul is not a gregarious sort. He dreads fund-raisers and drinks parties, all occasions at which he must give an account of himself to people he will never see again. Yet there are advantages to the company of strangers. You can tell them whatever you please: no lies perhaps, but no affecting truths. Paul does not fabricate well (though once, foolishly, he believed that he could), and the single truth he’s offered these random companions—that recently he lost his wife—brought down a flurry of theatrical condolence. (A hand on his at the breakfast table in Athens, the very first day: “Time, time, and more time. Let Monsignor Time do his tedious, devious work.” Marjorie, a breathy schoolmistress from Devon.)
Not counting Jack, they are ten. Paul is one of three men; the other two, Ray and Solly, are appended to wives. And then, besides Marjorie, there are two pairs of women traveling together, in their seventies at least: a surprisingly spry quartet who carry oversize binoculars with which they ogle everything and everyone, at appallingly close range. Seeing the sights, they wear identical, brand-new hiking boots; to the group’s communal dinners, cork-soled sandals with white crocheted tops. Paul thinks of them as the quadruplets.
In the beginning, there was an all-around well-mannered effort to mingle, but then, sure as sedimentation, the two married couples fell together and the quadruplets reverted more or less to themselves. Only Marjorie, trained by profession to dole out affection equally, continues to treat everyone like a new friend, and with her as their muse, the women coddle Paul like an infant. His room always has the best view, his seat on the boat is always in shade; the women always insist. The husbands treat him as though he were vaguely leprous. Jack finds the whole thing amusing: “Delightful, watching you cringe.” Jack is their guide: young and irreverent, thank God. Reverence would send Paul over the edge.
Even this far from home there are reminders, like camera flashes or shooting pains. On the streets, in the plazas, on the open-decked ferries, he is constantly sighting Maureen: any tall lively blonde, any sunstruck girl with a touch of the brazen. German or Swedish or Dutch, there she is, again and again. Today she happens to be an American, one of two girls at a nearby table. Jack has noticed them too, Paul can tell, though both men pretend to read their shared paper—day before yesterday’s
Times
. By no means beautiful, this girl, but she has a garish spirit, a laugh she makes no effort to stifle. She wears an eccentrically wide-brimmed hat, tied under her chin with a feathery scarf. (“Miss Forties Nostalgic,” Maureen would have pegged her. “These gals think they missed some grand swinging party.”) Little good the hat seems to have done her, though: she is sunburnt geranium pink, her arms crazed with freckles. The second girl is the beauty, with perfect pale skin and thick cocoa-colored hair; Jack will have an eye on that one.
The girls talk too loudly, but Paul enjoys listening. In their midtwenties, he guesses, ten years younger than his sons. “Heaven. I am telling you exquisite,” says the dark-haired girl in a husky, all-knowing voice. “A sensual sort of
coup de foudre
.”
“You go up on donkeys? Where?” the blonde answers eagerly.
“This dishy farmer rents them. He looks like Giancarlo Giannini. Those soulful sad-dog eyes alone are worth the price of admission. He rides alongside and whacks them with a stick when they get ornery.”
“Whacks them?”
“Oh just prods them a little, for God’s sake. Nothing inhumane. Listen—I’m sure the ones that hump olives all day really get whacked. By donkey standards, these guys live like royalty.” She rattles through a large canvas satchel and pulls out a map, which she opens across the table. The girls lean together.
“Valley of the Butterflies!” The blonde points.
Jack snorts quietly from behind his section of the
Times
. “Don’t tell the dears, but it’s moths.”
Paul folds his section and lays it on the table. He is the owner and publisher of the
Yeoman,
the Dumfries-Galloway paper. When he left, he promised to call in every other day. He has called once in ten and felt grateful not to be needed. Paging through the news from afar, he finds himself tired of it all. Tired of Maggie Thatcher, her hedgehog eyes, her vacuous hair, her cotton-mouthed edicts on jobs, on taxes, on terrorist acts. Tired of bickering over the Chunnel, over untapped oil off the Isle of Mull. Tired of rainy foggy pewtered skies. Here, too, there are clouds, but they are inconsequential, each one benign as a bridal veil. And wind, but the wind is warm, making a cheerful fuss of the awning over the tables, carrying loose napkins like birds to the edge of the harbor, slapping waves hard against the hulls of fishing boats.
Paul closes his eyes and sips his ice coffee, a new pleasure. He hasn’t caught the name for it yet; Jack, who is fluent, orders it for him. Greek is elusive, maddening. In ten days, Paul can say three words. He can say yes, the thoroughly counterintuitive
neh
. He can wish passersby in the evening—as everyone here does him—
kalespera
. And he can stumble over “if you please,” something like
paricolo
(ought to be a musical term, he decides, meaning “joyfully, but with caution”). Greek seems to Paul, more than French or Italian, the language of love: watery, reflective, steeped in thespian whispers. A language of words without barbs, without corners.
When he opens his eyes, he is shocked to see her staring at him. She smiles at his alarm. “You don’t mind, I hope.”
“Mind?” He blushes, but then sees that she is holding a pencil in one hand and, with the other, bracing a large book on the edge of her table. Her beautiful companion is gone.
Paul straightens his spine, aware how crumpled and slouched he must look.
“Oh no. Down the way you were. Please.”
“Sorry. How was I?” Paul laughs. “A little more like this?” He sinks in the chair and crosses his arms.
“That’s it.” She resumes her drawing. “You’re Scottish, am I right?”
“Well thank God she hasn’t mistook us for a pair of Huns,” says Jack.
“Not you. You’re English. But you,” she says to Paul. “I can tell, the way you said
little,
the particular way your
t
’s disappeared. I’m wild about Scotland. Last year I went to the festival. I biked around one of the lochs. . . . Also, I shouldn’t say this, you’ll think I’m so typically rudely American, but you look, you know, like you marched right out of that Dewars ad. The one, you know, with the collies?”
“Collies?” Paul sits up again.
“Oh, sorry—Madison Avenue nonsense. They show this shepherd, I mean a modern one, very tweedy, rugged, kind of motley but dashing, on the moors with his Border collies. Probably a studio setup out in L.A. But I like to think it’s real. The shepherd. The heather. The red phone booth—call box, right? . . .
Inverness.
” She draws the name out like a tail of mist, evoking a Brigadoon sort of Scotland. “I’d love to have one of those collies, I’ve heard they’re the smartest dogs.”
“Would you?” says Paul, but leaves it at that. Not long ago he would have said, My wife raises collies—national champions, shipped clear to New Zealand. And yes, they are the smartest. The most cunning, the most watchful.
“Hello
here
you are, you truants you.” Marjorie, who’s marched up behind Jack, bats his arm with her guidebook. “We’re off to maraud some poor unsuspecting shopkeepers. Lunch, say, at half past one, convene in the hotel lobby?” Paul waves to the others, who wait beyond the café awning. They look like a lost platoon in their knife-pleated khakis and sensible hats, bent over maps, gazing and pointing in all directions.
“Tally ho, Marj!” says Jack. “Half one in the hotel lobby. Half two, a little siesta; half three, a little . . . adventure. Pass muster with you?”
“Right-oh,” she says, saluting. She winks, accepting his tease.
This has become their routine: The first full day of each new place, Marjorie directs an expedition for souvenirs—as if to gather up the memories before the experience. While the others trail happily behind her, Jack and Paul read in a taverna, hike the streets, or wander through nondescript local ruins and talk about bland things, picking up odd stones to examine and discard. Paul buys no souvenirs. He should send cards to the boys—he did when they were in fact boys—but the kinds of messages adults send one another on postcards remind him precisely of the chatter he dislikes so much at drinks parties or sitting on a plane beside yet another, more alarming breed of strangers: those from whom you have no escape but the loo.
There’s one on every tour, Jack says of Marjorie: a den mother, someone who likes to do his job for him. And Marj is a good sport, he says, not a bad traveler. He likes her. But she exasperates Paul. She is a heroine out of a Barbara Pym novel: bookish, dependable, magnanimously stubborn, and no doubt beneath it all profoundly disappointed. At an age when she might do well to tint her hair, she’s taken up pride in her plainness as if it were a charitable cause. She dresses and walks like a soldier, keeps her hair cropped blunt at the earlobes. She proclaims herself a romantic but seems desperately earthbound, a stickler for schedules. Jack tells her again and again how un-Greek this attitude is, but she is not a when-in-Rome type of tourist. (“Right then: three on the dot at the Oracle, tea time!” Marjorie, sizing up Delphi.)
She turns now and waves to her regiment, strutting through the maze of tables. Jack smiles fondly. “O gird up thy loins, ye salesmen of Minotaur tea towels!” The American girl laughs loudly, a laugh of unblemished joy.
WHEN THE WAR ENDED,
when Paul shipped back to Dumfries from Verona, he found out, along with his mates, that half the girls they’d known in school had promised themselves to Americans—even, God forbid, to Canadians. Many were already married, awaiting their journey across the Atlantic with the restless thrill of birds preparing to migrate. Among them were some of the prettiest, cleverest, most accomplished and winning of the girls Paul remembered.
Maureen might have been one of those brides, if she’d chosen to be. But Maureen, pretty, outspoken, intrepid, knew what she wanted. She did not intend to wager away her future. “Those gals haven’t a clue what they’re in for, no sir. The man may be a prince, sure, but what’s he hauling you home to? You haven’t a clue, not a blistering clue.” She said this to Paul when she hardly knew him. Paul admired her frankness—that and her curly pinkish blond hair, her muscular arms, her Adriatic eyes.
When Paul came back, he was depressed. Not because he missed the war; what idiot would? Not because he lacked direction, some sort of career; how thoroughly
that
was mapped out. Not even because he longed for a girl; for someone like Paul, there were plenty of prospects. He was sad because the war had not made him into what he had hoped it would—worse, he came to realize, what so many similar fools hoped it would. He supposed he could assume it had made him a man, whatever that meant, but it had not given him the dark, pitiless eye of an artist. All that posturing courage (all that aiming, killing, closing your eyes and haplessly pretending to kill but rarely knowing if you had); the simultaneous endurance and fear of death—the dying itself heard in keening rifts between gunfire or in continuous horrific pleadings—all those dire things, Paul had thought when he shipped out, might plant in him the indelible passion of a survivor, a taut inner coil like the workings of an heirloom watch. He had told this rubbish to no one and was grateful to himself for that much. Of the virtues his father preached, discretion began to seem the most rewarding: it kept people guessing and sometimes, by default, admiring.
Mornings he spent at the paper: proofing galleys, answering telephones, cataloguing local events. He learned the ropes as his father expected. But after a late lunch at the Globe, often alone, he might wander into the bar, lose all sense of time and obligation. At night he sat in a neglected room of his parents’ large cold house and tried to write short stories. Paul was a good reporter—later he would win awards—but everything he tried to conjure from his heart sounded mealy and frail when he took it out to read in the morning.
The first year after the war was a time of modest anticipation. There was immense relief, drunken cheer, a stalwart sense of vindication. But the people he knew were careful not to voice grand expectations. When Paul stood back to consider the girls he courted, their dreams seemed to him self-consciously stunted; to be fair, so was his enthusiasm for courtship.
Maureen was not one of the girls from school. She worked at the Globe, sometimes as cook or barkeep, sometimes as a maid for the upstairs rooms. Always variety, she said. Always good company. Maureen flowered in the company of men. On nights she took the bar, she’d smoke, pour tall whiskeys, and hold her own on politics and farming. She told Paul without hesitation exactly what she thought of his father’s editorial opinions. (“Ah, the specially elegant ignorance of gentlemen!” she crooned—a remark that made him smile for days.)
One winter night after dinner, when his sisters had a dance show turned up so loud that it made his work more discouraging than usual, Paul took his father’s Humber and aimlessly cruised the town, stopping at last in the High Street.
The night crowd at the Globe was rural, more working-class than the customers at lunch. Feeling sorry for himself, despising his unshakable sense of superiority, Paul drank too much and argued too sharply. He knew now that it was just a matter of time before he’d give it up: “the fiction of the fiction,” he’d come to call it. At closing time he was the last man in the bar. He had no desire to face the cold, to be hit by the disappointment of no one’s company but his own. He watched Maureen wipe the snifters, lock the till, polish the bar to a glassy sheen.