Three Junes (5 page)

“I’ve never seen anything like it. There must be
fifty,
” Maureen said to Paul. “Rivals anything I could do.” Her face was bright from the cold air.

Colin came up and shook Paul’s hand, then Maureen’s. “See you later, over at the house?”

Paul had hoped they could skip the party, but Maureen was thrilled by the invitation to a hunt breakfast at Conkers. At least there had not been a blooding; the hounds had lost the line in a marsh. This meant there would be no “trophies,” no bits and pieces of the torn-apart quarry to award over watercress and crumpets.

On the way to his car, Colin turned. “Like a look at my kennels? I can give you a lift back.” Maureen let go of Paul’s hand and ran ahead.

The kennel was a refashioned armory, a small fortress complete with ramparts. Outside, the hounds roamed a grassy enclosure. As the car drove alongside, they leaped at the fence in a wave, howling and barking. Colin leaned out his window and howled right back. Maureen giggled. “Got to speak their language,” he said.

“I know about that,” she answered. Sitting behind her, Paul saw a tendon distend at the side of her neck: pride and irritation.

“Oh, you and your renowned collies. I could probably learn a thing or two,” said Colin as he opened her door.

He gave them each a white coat, like a doctor’s smock, to protect their clothing. “Wait here,” he said. He left them alone in a great stone room with a wooden berth along one side and a gate, a sort of portcullis, on the other. “Medieval,” Paul whispered. “The whole thing’s barbaric.”

“You’re such an old crosspatch,” Maureen whispered back.

The door behind them opened. Instantly, hounds swarmed around them. Paul cringed, but Maureen stood straight, laughing as they ran circles around their guests. The hounds did not jump up or growl but greeted Maureen and Paul with an amicable din of yipping and whining. On all fours, they stood nearly as high as Paul’s hip.

“All right you devils!” Colin called out. He clapped the back of the door with his hand. Right away, the animals were silent, noses pointed toward him. Only when they were all still did he walk among them, handing out treats from his pocket—scraps of meat, not the biscuits Maureen gave—and praising each one by name. Nimrod, Aria, Faultless and Faithful; Piccolo, Gallant, Delilah, Intrepid. Hannibal. Harmony. Diva. Orion. Their names ran off his tongue like a poem, a stream of mythical consciousness.

“Permit me a bit of showing off,” he said. “Bench, gentlemen!” Half the hounds, thirty or more, scrambled onto the wooden berth. They sat in a row, tense but quiet, facing the door in the opposite wall. The rest sat in front of them, lined up along the floor.

“Tom!” Colin shouted, and the kennelman, standing on the other side, hauled the door up on its winch. In the next room was a long trough. Still patient, the two rows of hounds looked back and forth from the trough to their master. Colin waited a long moment. “Ladies,” he said at last. The hounds in front, the bitches, bolted through the door. Those on the bench continued to wait, the only motion their quivering tails. Colin watched them for several seconds; they watched him back. “Gentlemen,” he said, and they leaped off the bench in unison, as if released by a latch.

Maureen applauded; Colin bowed slightly. “Utterly frivolous,” he said. “You see how I long for the army. Order for its own sake.”

He showed them the feed room, the heat pens, the whelping stall, the butcher’s table where the kennelman prepared the hounds’ meals. With his one hand, he helped Maureen and Paul out of the white coats and hung them neatly in a closet. He did everything, thought Paul, as perfectly as a dancer. On the lane back to the house, an incoming lorry pulled into a lay-by to make room; its driver waved to Colin. Paul looked back and saw its cargo—two dead cows. Meat from Colin’s own farm, he supposed, and he waited (unkindly, he knew) for their host to praise the economy of his little fiefdom.

Conkers was a square stone house, softened by thickets of yellow roses clambering to its eaves. Six full chestnut trees stood out front, and the sun through their changing leaves amplified the glow of the roses. Mobbing the downstairs rooms were boisterous riders who’d already drunk too much, unchecked small children pilfering cakes, and half a dozen barking terriers careening over the furniture. Colin led Paul and Maureen through the throngs—more at home, Paul suspected, than he would have been in a house without guests. He stood on one of his dining-room chairs and blew his hunting horn. Confined, the sound was uncomfortably shrill. It silenced even the terriers. “Hunters and civilians!” Colin announced. “We are here to inaugurate a splendid season of sport!” He raised a glass. Everyone cheered.

Maureen leaned toward Paul. “That’s ‘Gone Away,’ what he just played. It’s when the hounds have caught the line and taken off full tilt.”

“How do you know that?” Paul said.

She shrugged. “Grow up in the country, you learn a few things.”

BY THE TIME
they reach Mykonos, the sky has curdled, and the captain of the boat tells the passengers that he will want to leave an hour earlier than planned. Marjorie rallies a shopping group in record time.

Jack, Paul, and Fern walk through the streets until they reach a taverna that juts on stilts toward the water. As the waiter serves their lunch, the rain begins: large, ominous drops like the crystals that dangle from chandeliers. Jack winks at Fern and says, “So much for your delighted sailors, love.”

“Sailors in Greece,” she says, “probably go by different rules.”

Jack nods. “All the rules are different. It’s a turned-around place.”

“Widdershins,” says Fern. “Like in the fairy tales.”

Briefly, Jack sets a hand on top of her head. “Girl, if you aren’t a stitch.”

They eat quickly, without much talk. Jack looks repeatedly at the sky. Fern pushes away her plate after just a few bites of lamb. She takes out her book and a pencil, begins a sketch of the tossing boats.

When the rain lets up, Jack stands and gives Paul some money. “I’ll head over now, round up the souvenir hounds.”

As Paul counts out drachmas, Fern continues to draw. Only after they have left and are walking along the water does he speak. All that comes into his head is “You must love Paris.”

Fern doesn’t seem to find this pathetic. She says, “Oh, well,
love
is a tricky word, even in that context. But yes, I love it. At least, in all the ways you’re supposed to. As anyone would, right?”

“But in others . . .”

She looks at Paul, puzzled.

“In other ways, you’re not so sure?”

“All I meant was that people take their same old lives wherever they go. No place is perfect enough to strip you of that. And some places have a way of magnifying your demons, or of, I don’t know, giving them pep pills. And
there
I’d better stop.” She laughs, but the humor is forced.

What, Paul wonders, is a “same old life” to Fern? What could even be “old” to someone so young? When Fenno left for New York at her age, was he out to strip himself of some life he perceived as too same, too old?

“But you’re happy to be there.”

“To be somewhere that lives up so exactly to its reputation, it’s so outrageously beautiful—it’s fabulous and paralyzing all at once. Anna says the paralyzing’s self-inflicted, my fault entirely. But right now, I doubt I could be happier anywhere else. Or luckier. Most of my friends back home are in punch-the-clock jobs. I guess that’s the fate I’m just putting off, right?” She laughs awkwardly again. “So what do
you
go back to, after this trip?”

“Quiet. Domestic peace and quiet.
My
same old life.” They are almost at the quay, and Marjorie has spotted them. Paul stops. “Listen. I’m thinking of going over to Naoussa for dinner tonight, on my own. But I wouldn’t mind a companion.” She does not look up in response, and he adds, “Tomorrow we leave for Santorini.”

“Tomorrow? That’s quick.” She looks up now. She looks alarmed.

“Tours,” says Paul. “That’s tours for you. No stopping to savor anything, just a taste here and there, a sampling . . .”

“Antipasto,” says Fern, her nervous young way of deflecting unwanted silence, just as Marjorie pulls them both toward the queue at the gangway.

THE SAME AUTUMN
they were invited to Conkers, Betsey had her second litter. The night she whelped, Paul sat in bed reading. Downstairs, he could hear Maureen coaxing the bitch. Now and then he heard whining. He had been through a dozen such nights and still could not sleep when a bitch was whelping. He’d think of Maureen when she had Fenno: the long labor; Maureen’s gasping—more like a prolonged seething of air between her teeth, over and over—from the other side of the bedroom door. He was sure that if she were dying, no one would tell him. All he’d been told was that Fenno had turned around in the womb (as if, at the last minute, he’d decided to run for the hills) and was entering life backwards. “A nonconformist, just you wait,” the doctor joked once the baby was cleaned and swaddled.

Sometimes now, while Maureen sat with a bitch giving birth, Paul would go down and make tea. She’d scold him for losing a good night’s sleep. He’d lose it no matter what, he told her.

He waited this time until he could no longer stand it, till he’d read the same unturned page in his book half a dozen times. He had heard nothing for a while, then running water.

Maureen stood at the scullery sink. She jumped when he said her name. “Paul! It’s past two.” She looked at him over her shoulder but did not turn around.

He could see the red glow of the heat lamp over the whelping box, where Betsey nosed among the indistinct creatures that shivered and writhed between her legs. “Good girl there, Bets,” he said. Betsey did not thrash her tail to greet him as usual but stiffened and warned him away with her eyes.

“Let her be,” whispered Maureen. “She’s had a hard time. Thirteen all together.”

Paul came up behind her. Under his hands, her body felt like a barricade of muscle. There was a pail of pinkish water in the sink; she held her hands under the surface and did not move when Paul touched her.

He stepped back when she pulled her hands out of the pail. He’d thought she was washing them, but she held in each one a newborn black puppy. She laid their bodies on the drainboard. “A mongol,” she said as she emptied the pail down the drain. “And this little one, no tail.”

“No tail? Why kill that one? You could have found it a home.”

“Paul. Paul.” She spoke soothingly, as if he were one of the boys, acting up over a lost toy. “Something else is bound to be wrong with it, you can’t be soft.” She faced him. “Go back to your book, Paul.” She might as well have said, Go back to your cave.

Maureen wrapped the drowned puppies in sheafs of yesterday’s
Yeoman
. She went about cleaning up as she always did after a whelping, as if Paul were not there. Without offering to make tea, he went upstairs. In an hour, she lay down beside him and fell fast asleep.

The rest of the puppies were healthy and bright. When they were eight weeks old, they were let out to play with the older dogs. Colin Swift rode over from Conkers to see them. Working upstairs, Paul watched the dogs race loops around the lawn, leaving behind them a maze in the snow. When they were put away, he joined Maureen and Colin in the kitchen. She toweled the pups dry while Paul made the tea. Colin chose a small bitch with a white blaze, the one he claimed had chosen him.

“Her name’s Flora,” said Maureen. “None of your swish foxhound names. No crown princes or movie starlets bred here.”

Colin laughed and saluted her.

At the beginning of January, Paul was scheduled to go on a trip to Mexico and Guatemala with a group of editors, most of them from America. He’d accepted two tickets, but Maureen told him that now, with puppies to watch, there was no way she could go. Why not take Fenno? It was his first year away at school. He was doing well, and his masters liked him, but Maureen thought he needed a little adventure. He seemed so awfully serious, she said, not at all his old bombardier self. If he went with Paul, he would miss just a few days of school after the Christmas holiday.

Fenno was the only child on the trip, but he did not need playmates. He replied politely, even learnedly, to everything he was asked, and he never complained when Paul sent him to bed by himself after dinner. Later, when Paul retired, he would often find Fenno doubled over, asleep on the pages of a notebook. After unfurling his son’s body back onto the pillows, Paul would close the book and set it on a table, resisting the urge to read it. Not because he was so discreet but because he was afraid of the imagination he might uncover—one he might wish had been his.

The other editors and their husbands and wives told Paul to count his lucky stars for having such a son. They took Fenno’s presence as an invitation to complain and then boast about their own children.

In his few months away from home, Fenno had become assertively self-sufficient; this must be what Maureen saw as so “awfully serious.” But when Paul looked at Fenno, he saw a fledgling intellectual with interests all his own. He loved the jungle, especially the parrots and the monstrous insects; in Mexico City, Paul bought him a pair of high-powered binoculars. Paul was genuinely proud, but he was sad, too, when he noticed a new habit in Fenno, a habit of maintaining a solitary distance even in company—quietly, not belligerently—for half an hour or more. Paul felt his own presence erased at such times. At Tikal, when they emerged together behind the guide from the hot green tangle into the clearing around the pyramid, Paul realized how much he missed Maureen, how much he wished that she were here to share his amazements; Maureen with her quick eye and tongue, her capering passions. She would lower her voice to a whisper in awe but probably never stop talking. He knew that she embroidered silences for both of them, but not till he spent so much time alone with Fenno did he feel what it must be like for someone to be alone with him, with Paul.

Returning home, Paul saw Maureen as livelier, younger than ever. This was the way he felt about her when he returned from any trip, but now the extreme distance he had traveled made the illusion that much more acute. That winter and spring, he noticed for the first time how frequently she was away from home. If she wasn’t driving the twins to some sporting event or lesson, she was over at the farm. Colin Swift’s foreman had chosen a second pup, Rodney, to keep for himself and train with Flora.