Leon idled the motorcycle just outside David’s front door, and David climbed off in a reverie, stiffly, as if all his limbs were numb. His knees felt tender as his feet struck the pavement and he wobbled a little, then stretched.
‘What about Elizabeth?’ he asked, yawning, running his hands through his hair.
Leon idled the bike lower, quietening it. ‘What do you mean?’
‘I always felt like a shit that I stole Elizabeth from you,’ David said. ‘When you guys were going out. You remember—you introduced me to Elizabeth?’
‘You didn’t steal Elizabeth from me, man! She was a gift. I gave her to you!’ Leon backed the bike away from the curb, turning the front wheel into the road. ‘I thought you’d be perfect together.’
It started to rain, just a few big heavy drops at first, then suddenly, with a swishing susurrus, a downpour.
‘I’ll call you,’ Leon shouted, revving the bike. And he was gone.
Elizabeth Ruel was the only child of a US Army general. She had been moving around all her life, and she was expert at planning and executing departures and arrivals. With virtually unlimited financial resources and with a full-time private secretary to barrage the airline, the moving and storage company, and the newly hired American staff by phone, fax, and e-mail throughout April, May and early June, she was able to preserve an atmosphere of total serenity on the day she traveled with her children from London to Rixeyville,Virginia. The only things Elizabeth could neither predict nor control were the weather and the behavior of the children, but she had learned over the years of flying transatlantically for summer vacations, for Christmas shopping, for medical appointments, for parties, to prepare herself mentally for the general types of intemperateness she might expect from the skies and from her offspring. Elizabeth sometimes told her children that serenity came from within; more precisely, she pictured it as a blanket which she could take out and lay over them. She really did not need to take a tranquilizer, and neither did they. The first-class cabin was big enough and empty enough to preclude anything jarring from another passenger. Toward delay, restlessness, boredom, Elizabeth cultivated an attitude of courteous passivity. On this journey, as in life, she had reduced the number of possible unexpected events to a minimum; there was no point in hurry, worry, anxiety, or bother of any kind.
When she arrived at Dulles airport with Gordon, Hope, and their nanny, who was called Norma, there were two cars waiting, a silver Mercedes and a dark green Land-Rover. The farm manager, Mr Richards, had already been instructed by fax to take Norma and the luggage in the Land-Rover. But first Norma belted Gordon and Hope into the back seat of the Mercedes. Nobody spoke; there was nothing that needed to be decided or even discussed. Hope stirred as she was transferred from her stroller like wounded personnel from a stretcher, then quickly settled to sleep again, her neck collapsing at a crickmaking angle, her hair rubbed to a rat’s nest by the long hours on the itchy airplane seat. Gordon, a dazed marine, upright and obedient in his exhaustion, stubbed his foot against the wheel of Hope’s stroller, tripped and fell against the open car door, and crushed Norma inside as she bent over Hope in the back seat.
Elizabeth chuckled, placid, concertedly unruffled, and pulled the door open again, taking Gordon by the hand. ‘Let’s go around to the other side,’ she said in an instructing tone of voice, and then very softly, ‘Tell Norma you’re sorry.’
He mouthed it blankly. ‘Sorry, Norma.’
Norma reached down and rubbed the dents across the backs of her stalwart, black-stockinged calves, but she didn’t stand up or take her head out of the car and she didn’t say anything.
Slowly, sedately, Elizabeth and Gordon walked around the back of the Mercedes. Gordon was carrying a stuffed bear. The bear’s legs were tucked inside Gordon’s bent forearm like the ends of a Roman toga and the bear’s top half was reaching over toward the ground, the arms stretched downward like an acrobat in midhandspring. Gordon’s navy-blue shorts and his underpants were sticking to his thighs and bottom with sweat; he took his other hand from his mother’s and reached down to tug his clothes away from his skin, missing a step. Elizabeth lifted her upper lip disapprovingly; almost imperceptibly she shook her head. But two lessons at once were too many, she decided. She forebore to correct her son further and only smoothed his white shirt across the back of his shoulders.
The flounced hem on Elizabeth’s flowered chiffon skirt fluttered around her finely sculpted knees as a hot wind blew across the tar-smelling, black parking lot. The skirt was creased in the back all the way up to the center vent of her cream linen jacket. Otherwise she was ready for the diplomatic press corps. She watched Gordon climb onto the seat still holding his bear, then she leaned down and gave him a kiss on the cheek. She didn’t touch his seatbelt.
‘Wait for Norma,’ she said, just above a whisper; then with a lonely air returned around the car to where the chauffeur, his eyes respectfully glued to her low-heeled, open-backed, cream suede shoes, was holding the passenger door open for her.
Elizabeth always spoke in an undertone, as if guarding her privacy from eavesdroppers. Her voice was soft and wan, with the faintest hint of a southern drawl, and it had a plaintive quality, as of a lady in distress or someone very tired. In moments of excitement or uncertainty, she dropped the volume even lower; she found this commanded the best of people’s attention.
She made no sound at all as she slipped into the car. The seat was burning hot underneath her thighs and she sat up with a silent jolt of pain, lifting her knees to get the flesh clear of the upholstery and flexing her toes onto their very tips to keep her legs high. She turned her head back and said without emotion to Norma, ‘Please check the seat; it might be hot. Do they need something to sit on?’
Norma put the flat of her big, red-mottled hand on the leather between the children, feeling it. ‘It’s fine, Mrs Judd,’ she said in her brusque, indefinably rural English accent. She looked at Gordon. ‘This one’s not complaining.’
The chauffeur circled the car, pressing the doors closed with a firm, subdued click, then got in and started the engine, leaning forward as he did so to conceal the steering column and ignition with a kind of demure, round-shouldered posture that seemed to apologize for the need to exercise his professional capacities in front of Elizabeth and her children.
‘Wait for them,’ Elizabeth said, hardly moving her lips. She watched Norma hoisting herself into the Land-Rover. The brown uniform travels well, she was thinking, but I’ll have to get her out of those thick black tights or she’ll die in this weather.
The drive took over two hours. The afternoon heat shimmered above the rushing, tire-whitened highway and above the sprawling scars of unrelenting development. Strip malls, office parks, condos sat exposed, treeless and shrubless, on the dusty green verges and raw red earth.
Elizabeth couldn’t bear the view. She looked straight ahead.
Out of the corner of one eye, she thought she saw the Land-Rover overtaking them in the outside lane. She turned her head and glanced past the chauffeur. Norma leaned forward in the front seat, grinning and waving as the Land-Rover shot past, windows flashing in the sun.
Elizabeth raised her eyebrows. She tilted her head across the center console, glancing at the speedometer: nearly seventy.
‘How do I get Mr Richards?’ she asked blandly.
The chauffeur’s eyes flickered toward her; he took his foot off the gas, letting the car lose speed.
‘The cell phone’s at your elbow, ma’am. Just press the green phone twice. I called him just before you arrived.’
She could see the Land-Rover moving away in the left lane; then as the phone began to ring against her ear, it pulled back into the center lane a few cars in front of them.
‘Hello?’ Mr Richards’s