“One mustn’t forget, Mumsie, that Uncle Davey first went to America by sailing ship,” Hester said. “It’s hard to adjust when you get older. At least that’s what Grandma was always saying when she moved in with us and started her nonstop complaining.” She started to circulate both cups of poured tea and plates of gingersnaps as if she were presiding at some sedate garden party. She served Davey first.
He felt too fatigued—probably a further wave of jet lag added to his irritation—to deal with Hester’s juvenile barbs. In fact, the self-image that clumped through his weary mind was one of those bulls of Pamplona—only one that was too long in the tooth to effectively vent its spleen against its puerile persecutors. In any case, Cousin Alyson, in her pacifically determined way, wasn’t about to encourage feuding in her presence, although Davey thought she was motivated by a pathetic hunger to preserve family unity rather than defend her cousin from these vengeful little ageists.
So abandoning antagonisms, Davey let Alyson’s words ooze over him, rather like the sun-warmed fringe of surf back home would sometimes trickle through his toes. Her kids, irritated, he suspected, by her gentle forbearance with the likes of her gay relative, began to disperse. First Quentin gathered up his canine toiletries and, with placid Nigel obediently at his heels, left for his “study” at the top of the house. Then Hester announced she wanted to see her favourite TV program, which was a series, she duly informed her second cousin, called Tragedies of the Century from theTitanic to theHindenburg, and followed in her brother’s wake.
A few seconds of silence ensued as Alyson moved to the chair her daughter had vacated and then initiated a discussion on their late Aunt Hannah, although that was only after a mild preliminary sparring over something Davey knew from long experience she’d bring up, even while praying she wouldn’t.
“You’ll stay with us, of course? The children have your room all prepared.”
“Alyson, I didn’t even know they’d be home. In any case, I booked in at the Gresham as usual. But I already told you that over the phone. Ken and I like the independence. We stayed there even when my parents were alive. It has nothing to do with affection or anything like that.”
“I just thought…what with the funeral and our being her only living relatives.” She sniffed, and for one awful moment he thought she was going to cry.
“You know very well, my dear, that if she hadn’t been spending the summers with us in recent years I’d hardly be here myself. After all, she was only our aunt by marriage. By the way, I quite understand your not coming down there with me. It would be sheer sentimentality. And as far as those kids are concerned, rank hypocrisy!”
At least that got her off the staying-under-her-roof business, he exalted. Then, with a fresh burst of reproach emphasizing the worry lines of her face, she sought to excuse her absence from the funeral. “I would’ve gone, if you’d insisted, Davey Whatever you say, my dear, she was still our Aunt Hannah. It’s just that tomorrow happens to be my busiest. I could even have juggled my shut-ins with Mrs. Armstrong and taken hers next week. But tomorrow is Allen’s birthday, and they phoned from St. Bride’s to say he was having one of his better spells and might even recognize me if I were to bring him presents from his brother and sister and bake him a birthday cake.” She paused. “He…he didn’t last year.” Then, as if to cheer them both up, she added, “At any rate, he isn’t being violent this time.”
As she talked about her schizophrenic son, Davey sat mute. He withheld eye contact, too. Allen was rarely mentioned. That was the final tragedy in an excessively scarred life that had included an early and abrupt single parenthood from her husband’s bloody expiry in an auto accident in Normandy, and the subsequent presence of her mother who had easily earned the title of monster during those intolerable years the lady had stayed with Alyson and the three young children in NOtting Hill, after quitting Falmouth on the wings of widowhood from a henpecked husband.
All of that was now stale if still depressing knowledge for Davey. Sometimes he thought it should have linked them more firmly, especially in a family where bonds were so close to being manacles. But although Alyson was only ten years his junior—she’d married late—her woes seemed to have forever placed her out front in the family quest for inimitable martyr in the race for who bore the heaviest crown. Indeed, by comparison, he knew they weren’t only leagues apart in that particular competition—his own life with Ken appearing idyllic in comparison—but in so many other ways it seemed they had inhabited differing worlds since adulthood separated them. And he knew that meant far more than geography.
His own degree of weaning from Cornwall had begun forty years earlier and had surely been invigorated by a near-lifetime on another continent that might as well have been another planet—and with a mate whose roots were as firmly planted in California as his own were in Cornwall. Yet, deep down, he was sorely aware he was still bedevilled by his place of birth, a place she had managed to so facilely shed for the lure of London and what he secretly called her acquired English values. He was always aware that she persisted in referring to the county of Cornwall, a wholly accurate designation, while he clung to the misleading, because less specific, duchy of Cornwall for its romantic Royalist and literary allusions.
He clenched hands until he felt nails digging into palms. Surely, he told himself, it was significant that he alone was going to bury Aunt Hannah on the morrow. Alyson and her offspring—whatever the excuses—were not.That was all the accuracy of place he felt he needed. He’d be there; they wouldn’t.
But all that said, his irritation with her kids also notwithstanding, they still shared something he believed neither did with anyone else. It was an elusive thing, hard to name, hard to characterize. In Cornwall they would have been content to ascribe their bond to common bloodlines, but that was too facile for Davey. The son of the gene-conscious age, he was no longer satisfied with totem words for either the menace and tyranny or the shared joys and insights from their inherited genetic bank.
They shared a volatile sense of childhood, liking the same relatives and equally scorning others. Another thing he relished was their ability to trust each other to a profound degree.
He knew a peace in her company that wasn’t only at violent odds with the feelings her children set up in him, but which he knew she reciprocated. If only she didn’t sometimes bore him… But where was perfection? he ruefully asked himself, concluding his little meditation.
In spite of poor Alyson’s endless attempts to calm the choppy waters that Quentin and Hester perversely animated, Davey believed she identified basically with him, her only cousin, and that this went beyond the claims and instincts of her own offspring. The frequent signs that the ever-potential rift between her children and himself was painfully troubling to her he took as evidence of what they shared from their own childhood past. Put simply, he silently argued, Alyson and he loved each other in a very Cornish family manner. And like all true human riches, such love was effortless— unimpeded by all the separations and vastly different attitudes to overcoming the hurdles and ambushes of the days.
Why, then, all this being true, he asked himself, did they fret and peeve as they sat there that late-September afternoon, discussing Aunt Hannah and what had set her apart from the Bryant clan?
If it wasn’t her children, then surely it was what they stood for: that ineluctable Englishness they had absorbed and what, in a narrower sense, they had inherited as teenage Londoners in today’s world. Some historical umbilical cord had been severed and their mother was powerless to mend it. The fluke of gayness, the chance of geography, had removed him, only to confirm him, paradoxically, in that Cornish ancestry they had repudiated and duly lost.
Life, the aggressive present, had also persuaded Alyson that her Celtic past was moribund and that survival for her from the wounds that littered and weighted her past meant a total grasping of the world she now inhabited and caring not one whit for the one she had left: that snug, crescent of a harbour and scattering of alien palms along the Falmouth front that stretched beyond the bay and lipped the English Channel’s mouth.
“You say you don’t want to reconsider staying