“Eleanor’s bugbear,” Rupert said. “?‘Passing be not proud though some have called thee/ Mighty and dreadful…’?” He smiled at Francie, then took a swallow of scotch. “I maintain the English disdain of euphemism, but I’ve been Americanized on the medical front.” He paused. “Almost all fronts. I love America.”
“I take it the doctors are willing to cooperate,” Francie said.
“With unseemly enthusiasm,” Rupert said. “They haven’t tried arsenic or mercury or Drano, but almost everything else.”
“I shall miss you so,” Francie said. “When I met you the first time, in 1989, when you came to visit Will at King’s, I thought, All right, I might be able to marry this young American, with his English father. I won’t stop being English. I won’t become American, or Americanized. You’re still very English, you know. Not all fronts. You walk like an Englishman, a cricketer. You’ve got that English athlete’s slouch.”
“Do I?” he said. He smiled at her.
“And then, you were so open with everyone there, about being an orphan and being poor. It knocked me for a loop,” she said.
“I wasn’t like that when I was a student. When I was at Longleat, I played on the cricket first eleven. I’d been given a bat by a master but I didn’t have any of the other equipment or any of the clothes. The headmaster asked an old boy if he would buy them for me. He did. I was instructed to write him a thank-you note.”
“Christ,” Francie said, then stopped. “I’m sorry. No blasphemy,” she said. “Only profanity. Like the Restoration.”
Rupert waved his hand. “I’m past that distinction these days,” he said.
“Did you play cricket at Cambridge?” she asked.
“Yes. For King’s, not for Cambridge. This time, I asked Father Falkes if he could help. I couldn’t ask the provost. It would have been too humiliating. And the thought I might have to write a letter of thanks was stomach-churning. I’ve never supported the named scholarships that have the student recipients write the donors. Exacting gratitude. Father sent me money. He must have taken it from the collection plate. My paltry pocket money probably came from the collection plate. I didn’t think about it.” He paused. “I have a tendency to avoid thinking about personally unpleasant things. All my life. Close the door and move on.”
Rupert gazed at his lovely daughter-in-law, realizing he had never had a conversation so personal, so unguarded with an Englishwoman. He understood why Will had fallen in love with her. He felt half in love with her too. Cambridge in his day was a man’s world. There had been so few women when he was there, fewer than ten percent, and the university had shunted them to the women’s colleges on the out-outskirts. He had never spoken to a female student. He wouldn’t have known what to say. It was as if girls spoke a foreign language. He had known no girls or women growing up, except school matrons and housekeepers. If he had seen a girl like Francie, he wouldn’t have approached her. It wasn’t until America, until Vera, that he ever talked to a woman. He knew he was lucky to have married Eleanor, as elusive as she was, and until he met Dominic, she was the only person he spoke frankly to and with. Still, he was a man of his generation. It wasn’t so much that he preferred the company of men as that he found them so much easier to be with. “How about those Yankees?” Until Susanna, he was grateful he’d had only boys. Now there was Francie too.
Rupert cast back his thoughts to Cambridge. His memory was fragmenting, whether from the cancer or the chemo or the scotch, he couldn’t say. He had not been happy at Cambridge, but not unhappy either. It was his ticket. He took advantage of his opportunities. At Longleat, he had kept mostly to himself, the fear always lurking in the back of his mind that he’d be exposed, despite his last name, as a parish child, “to be cuffed and buffeted through the world, despised by all, and pitied by none.” That fear receded at Cambridge. As a bona fide Leater, he’d moved up in the world, becoming even an object of envy. There were boys at Cambridge from lower castes, boys who went to grammar schools and minor public schools, boys with regional accents, boys who weren’t Church of England. He saw there was currency other than money and ancestry: accent, education, Latin, cricket, most of all the aura of effortless superiority. He knew what he needed to do.
“Being poor in my day was still thought to be a personal failing, as being rich was regarded as a personal virtue,” Rupert said. “Americans still feel that way. The English seem to have moderated their views. The landed rich are deserving; the rest just got in at the right time.” He paused. “Partners at my firm used to point to me as the American Dream incarnate, the orphaned immigrant who came from nowhere.” He laughed. “There are Americans who never heard of Cambridge, only Oxford.”
“Why Cambridge?” Francie said. “I’d have taken you for an Oxford man, so worldly.”
“Reverend Falkes had gone to King’s, right after World War I. ‘So many dead young men,’ he said. ‘They took me because I applied and could pay the fees.’?”
“I’m no different from your partners. I had never heard of Princeton, only Harvard and Columbia,” Francie said. “Will felt slighted. I told him I was London provincial. I had never before met anyone who’d gone to Princeton.”
“Eating clubs. Princeton is famous for its eating clubs,” Rupert said.
“Will said you’d say that,” Francie said, laughing. “He said you’ve always regretted that none of them went to Harvard.”
“I’ve never understood why Harry picked Princeton,” Rupert said.
“I asked him once, a few years ago, when I first realized that the whole pack had gone there. He said, ‘I think I knew it would take even Jack.’ Harry rounding up his sheep.”
Rupert poured himself another scotch. “Sweet old Harry,” he said. They sat quietly for a few minutes, Rupert sipping his drink the whole time. “Tell me,” Rupert said. “What’s going on with you?”
“Will may have told you. We’re trying in vitro fertilization, a test-tube baby. It fills me with hope and dread. I want a baby so much but I worry that I’ll get someone else’s baby and someone else will get ours. I’m half-mad with worry. Will says I’m completely mad. It must be the hormones, I’m on the verge of tears all the time and I obsess about everything, not only Rosemary’s Baby. How will I know if it’s ours, both of us in that tube? People are so careless, so sloppy.” She stopped. “I’m sorry about what I said, not wanting someone else’s baby. I can be so stupid.”
Rupert shook his head. “No, no. Science is doing miracles, as it ought,” he said. He reached over and touched Francie’s hand. “Don’t get sentimental. Don’t name a boy for me. I never liked Rupert—better than Cyril, but just.” Francie nodded. Rupert sat back. “If we had had a girl, we were going to call her Mary, after Father Falkes’s mother.”
“My granny was Mary,” Francie said, wiping away tears with her sleeve. “Don’t mind them,” she said. “Hormonal.”
“I’m sad I won’t get to meet your baby,” Rupert said.