The Englishman

chapter 38

I HAD EXPECTED GILES and his cabin by the lake would dissolve into a sweet but hazy dream the moment my plane touched down at LaGuardia, but the very opposite happens. It is as if I had spent a week in the best place in the world and had been cast out into a chaos of people, noise, stench and loneliness.

I brace myself for the maternal onslaught, but Gloria remains shtum on the subject. It is as if I never planned to arrive seven days earlier. She feeds me and fills me in on all the depressing family details, but she doesn’t ask a single question about the man for whom I risked a big family rumpus. I’m guessing I have Nathan to thank for that. He and Jessica have decided to file for a divorce.

“Mom hasn’t asked me a single question about…about Giles,” I inform Nat glumly.

“Couldn’t very well,” Nat tells the baseball glove he is he is trying to fix. “She didn’t even know his name. Giles, huh?”

“Yes. So she took it really badly?”

“Could say that. On top of my little train wreck. Of course she has decided he is a married Catholic or a convicted criminal, or you would have told her about him.”

“No, he’s not. He’s a divorced WASP.”

“Jesus, Anna!” he breathes and looks up. We stare at each other for a second and then double up in convulsions of laughter.

My relatives make up for my mother’s ostensible lack of interest in my love life. The first thing everyone asks me is whether I have met anyone “down there.” Some of them know about Nick Hornberger, and for once I am happy to make him the topic of conversation. At least they’ll know the worst of him before he ruins my career at Ardrossan.

It is my father who eventually takes the bull by the horns, while my mother has her back turned to us in the kitchen.

“So this is all a recent development, this man that you met?”

“Not all that recent, but—yes.”

“Don’t make her talk about him, Dad. She’s found herself a WASP.”

“Nat, you’re not helping!”

“Well, statistically speaking, given the demographics in your part of the country, that wasn’t unlikely,” my father tells the egg whisk he is trying to fix. “I will admit, however, that I’m a little surprised. You’re going out with a Republican? Most of these Came-Over-in-the-Mayflower families down there are Republican, aren’t they?”

“Well, he isn’t, and his family didn’t.”

“Didn’t what?”

“Come over in the Mayflower. They were parliamentarians in the Civil War.”

“Parliamentarians? What are you talking about?”

“Not this Civil War. The English one, in the seventeenth century. Giles is English.”

Nat gives me a delighted slap on the shoulder.

“An Englishman! Just what you always wanted!”

“C’mon guys, gimme a break. Start kvetching, or I’ll feel even more guilty about this than I already do.”

“Why should we complain?” Mom shrugs sarcastically. “Our daughter is only going to live on another continent, thousands of miles and an ocean away from her family, among strangers. That’s no reason to complain, is it?”

“No one said anything about another continent, Mom!”

“How much of this is because he’s English?”

“I don’t know. This could be about a dozen things! He’s smart and funny and kind—I find that attractive! He’s older than me—yes, I find that attractive, too! He’s the most beautiful man I have ever known—and that—”

“Yes, yes, we get your point,” Dad hurries to interrupt me, evidently afraid of where my enumeration will take me.

“—but none of that is why I love him!”

“Love! Almighty!” My mother groans and throws up her hands.

“I’m not going to justify this to you. I’m not.” I couldn’t, even if I wanted to, because I’m so upset that tears are clogging up my voice. If there is one thing guaranteed to fend off my mother’s enquiries, it is tears.

“You’re thirty years old, I’m sure you know best.” End of discussion. When emotions boil over, my mother flees from the kitchen.

“No, I don’t know best!” I fire up. “The whole thing is a complete mess, Mom, and I have no idea how this is going to end! I’m frightened what will happen if we go on, and I’m frightened what will happen if we end it! And I knew beforehand that talking to you about it wouldn’t help me resolve anything—that’s why I almost didn’t come home! I knew I’d have to sit here for two weeks, pretending that I’m fine, when this is…choking me!”





That night I stay at Sheena’s because the girl who rents my old room has flown home to Ohio to see her family over Christmas. I feel like a nomad, with my rucksack and my laptop. No, worse. I feel like a tourist. Irene and Jacques, like a lot of couples that are thinking about breaking up, have rented an apartment together, and I stay with them for another couple of nights. When Irene hears that I’ll be flying to England for ten days, she is immediately suspicious.

“Are you going to see him there?”

“No.”

“Then why are you going?”

“To see Debbie and Dave in Bristol, and Lisa and Gavin in London, and hopefully Kate Allard for tea one day. I haven’t been for ages. Eighteen months.”

Irene watches me play with my salad.

“But you have been seeing him, haven’t you?”

“Yes.”

“And?”

“And nothing. Nothing you didn’t know before.”

“I think you are going to see him,” she decides. “Is that the plan from now on, to fly to England for dirty weekends with your colleague?”

“I am not going to see Giles over there! I’m going for a job interview.”

Irene’s reaction—a long sigh and a long pause—is worse than I had expected, though less vociferous.

“If you must, you must, Anna. There’s obviously not enough here to keep you, and that place down there is a madhouse.”

“You did hear that I said job interview, right? I may stay at Ardrossan a good while yet, provided they don’t fire me. Which they might, given the fact that—” I hesitate. “Given the fact that some of my students have accused me of sexual harassment. Oh, and you know who Selena, the girl in the observatory, has sex with? And who got her pregnant?”

Predictably, this distracts her attention, and even Jacques gets involved in our debate about the various words I will have to have with various people when I get back to Ardrossan. It’s the most enjoyable evening I spent with them in years.

But when my plane circles in a holding stack above Buckinghamshire and we approach Heathrow from the west, with the Thames glistening like a silver snake in the sun and the pilot alerting us to the fact that visibility is good enough to see Windsor Castle, tears are running down my cheeks. I don’t even try to stop them.

“Sorry—are you all right?” my neighbor asks me. He has been sleeping or reading the whole time, while I have been sleeping and staring out the window the whole time. This is the first sentence he has addressed to me.

“Yes, I’m sorry.” I brush away the tears with my sleeve. “I’m just realizing that I will have to come and live here.”

“That is, indeed, a prospect to reduce anyone to tears,” he says dryly and hands me a paper tissue.





Before I make my way to East London, I travel down to Bristol for a few days’ coaching and counseling.

“Look, I’m gonna do what I do, okay? And either it’s enough or not. I may not even want this job!”

“That’s your strength,” Dave says, punching the air. “You can go in confident and strong! But don’t come across as too American—well, you know that, don’t you? But don’t try to be English, either. You’re fine as you are!”

“So…what about your beshert?” Debbie asks me when we’re alone. “Oh, dear—as bad as that?”

I dash away the water from my eyes.

“Yeah…really bad.”

“Have you been, er, seeing him?”

“Mm-hmm.”

She nods. Then she shrugs. “Well…”

“What?”

“Well, if you get the job at Queen Mary, you could—”

“Go on sleeping with him for six months and then leave him?”

She shrugs again.

“I don’t think I could leave him,” I say.

“But if you get the job?”

“I know. I don’t know.”

“If he didn’t exist and you got the job?”

“Oh, in that case…” My chest expands with relief. “I don’t know. I feel I would come back to England. I feel I would want to. But I feel so many crazy things at the moment, how can I trust my judgment? Giles will have to ditch me. I can’t.”

“Wait till he breaks up with you? That’s miserable!”

“Yes, I know.”

On Monday morning Debbie and I take the fast train to London. Under the grubby glass dome of Paddington Station, we part company.

“Right,” she says resolutely. “Remember—it’s all about choice. That’s all. You want to have the choice, Ardrossan or London. That’s all.”

I make my way across London and amble along the busy Mile End Road toward a nondescript brown brick building. It looks like a cross between a big dental practice and a community center, and while the traffic is rushing past me, I wonder whether I am crazy to even consider leaving a place as beautiful as Ardrossan. But when Ewan Buchanan picks me up in the hall, I am strangely calm and, suddenly, wonderfully focused.

“And you would really move to the UK?” It is the oldest among my interviewers, a man with an almost-white beard and a red bowtie, who seems skeptical.

I was prepared for the question, but none of my prepared answers seem appropriate.

“Yes. Yes, I would.”

“Anna has flown in from the States.” Ewan Buchanan comes to my aid. “Surely that speaks for her motivation!”

“I’m sure her motives are most honorable,” Professor Simpson agrees. “I would like to have them explained to me, that’s all.”

I have a job. I don’t need to lie.

“Well, sir, I spent five of the past ten years in England, and by and large they were the better years, personally and professionally.”

He waits for more.

“The truth is, I think I would be more productive living in England. And happier.”

Back at Heathrow I have that bizarre feeling at the end of a holiday that I only just arrived two days ago. Bored with the trashy novels on the shelves of W. H. Smith, I select a volume about British country houses up for sale and in need of refurbishment. That will keep me dreaming on the flight.

“Anna?” a male voice addresses me. “Anna! What are the odds!”

So lost am I in thought that it takes me several seconds to recognize the burly, bouncy redhead. Paul French has been to see his children and his mother and is waiting for his flight back to Chicago. He suggests coffee, and I don’t see how I can refuse.

“It’s amazing how fast you can get from London to New York these days! You’ll be making the trip more often in future, won’t you?” he says significantly. “Maybe you should get yourself a job in the old country, too. Mind you, pay-wise, that’s bad advice, and so I told Giles. I earn heaps more at Notre Dame than I did in the UK.”

For a moment or two I’m too confused to answer.

“Have I put my foot in it?” he asks, pulling a face of contrition. “Forget that I—”

“What do you mean, Paul?”

“No, no, he obviously didn’t…well, I assumed Giles would have mentioned it.”

“Is Giles going back to England?” I sound calm, but Paul French is no fool.

“Look, I assumed—”

“Where?” As if that was the point. But I’m too frightened to ask when.

“They’ve offered him my old job at UCL. That’s why he came to see me at Notre Dame, to discuss the offer. God, Anna, I’m so sorry, I assumed he told you! Don’t tell him I—”

“I won’t tell him you told me,” I say slowly, thinking fast. “Don’t worry. I won’t say a word.”