“How gorgeous,” his mother says, and neither Paul nor Alice says anything in response.
His mother’s right, though, Paul thinks. It is gorgeous—it really is. Lush open fields sloping toward gunmetal beaches. Sheep dotting hillsides like wisps of cotton. The sun glinting off the surface of the water. It’s not the blazing glory of a California sunset—that fiery magnificence whose beauty lies in its ability to convince you each night that the world is ending. No, he thinks, there’s something subtler going on here, something less intrusive. A polite and very British reminder that gorgeous things are out there and happen every day.
“Thomas Hardy country,” Alice says.
Paul blinks. “Never read him.”
“That’s a lie. We had to read Far from the Madding Crowd in the tenth grade.”
“I know. I didn’t read it. Bought the Cliffs Notes.”
“Tess of the d’Urbervilles?”
“Skipped that one, too.”
Alice looks at him in the rearview mirror. “What a disappointment.”
Paul ignores her. At lunch she twice interrupted him by taking out her phone, and once she stormed away from the table, sans excuse, to make a call. He’s irritated—today is his day to be in a foul mood.
He looks out the window, back to the sea.
Mark was an asshole, right? Particularly at the end? Yes, Paul tells himself. He was. Objectively, Mark was an asshole. Why, then, can’t Paul seem to believe that? Why, in the past seventy-two hours, has he been dead set on revising the history of their relationship, on wiping clean the terrible and sadistic ways Mark treated him? It’s not due to a lack of effort; he’s lost track of how many times he’s replayed that scene from the Millennium Bridge, of how many times he’s recited Mark’s words, zeroing in on his cold, compassionless voice. But every time he does that—every time he’s on the verge of convincing himself that, maybe, this breakup is a good thing—he’ll stumble upon some other memory. He’ll recall those heady days when they first moved to Philadelphia and Mark’s insecurities overshadowed his own. When Paul would hold Mark’s head in his lap and stroke his hair as Mark rattled on about what it was like to be young and inexperienced in one of the country’s best economics departments. Paul would respond with what he knew Mark needed to hear—that he was brilliant, that it was only a matter of time until his colleagues realized that—and Mark would pull his face down to him and kiss him and tell him how crazy, how absolutely fucking crazy, he’d go without him. Invariably, the next day Paul would come home to find lamb roasting in the oven; he’d trudge in after another terrible day with Goulding to an apartment filled with the woodsy scents of rosemary and sage. “Hell,” Mark would say, wiping his hands on his apron. “It’s the least I could do.” And there was, of course, more: in the middle of the night, for example, when he thought Paul was asleep, Mark had a tendency of kissing the back of his neck, of gently mussing his hair. During the last six months, these moments grew few and far between—Paul was more likely to find Mark snoring with his back turned toward him than gently kissing him—but still, for some vexing reason, he can’t help but give them a disproportionate amount of attention. They grow and fester, these pleasant memories, forming indelible cancers that belie Paul’s despair. What he wouldn’t give, he thinks, to be wholly convinced of Mark’s dickishness. To be rid of this nagging doubt rooted in happier times.
“Where am I going?” Alice says. “It looks like the road splits up here.”
“Hold on.” Paul struggles to get her phone out of his pocket. “I think you want to stay on the A338.”
“That’s not what my map says.”
“Mom, I thought you put that goddamned thing away. We don’t have a lot of time here, Paul.”
“Hold on.”
Freeing the phone, he opens the atlas. “Yeah, just stay on this road.”
He makes a silent note that Alice doesn’t thank him, and as he’s moving to slip the phone back into his pants, it buzzes quietly in his palm. Looking down, he sees a new message from Jonathan: I TOLD YOU TO STOP CALLING ME.
What should he tell her? That he now knows the source of her irritation? That her boss-cum-lover has rejected her? That, like Paul, she’s being spurned and discarded, written off as subpar? He’s filled, suddenly, with a violent empathy for Alice, with a need to protect her from the awful fucking love mess that’s weighing him down.
With a quick sleight of hand, he deletes the message and watches it vanish from the screen.
Donna
July 9
It’s a spectacular house, she thinks, looking at the accommodations that Eloise has found for her, Alice, and Paul: an old dairy farm called Tenderway Glen that’s been retrofitted and converted into a posh vacation rental. But then, what else should she expect from Eloise? Donna smiles: she taught her well. In addition to the property’s main house, its square lawn is flanked on one side by a smaller guest cottage, and on the other by a series of unused cow stalls, sheltered beneath a sloped tin roof. Beyond the property line, to Donna’s rear, extends a broad meadow of wet, green grass, where there’s a flock of sheep, which make it their business to baa at the wind.
Soon, she’ll need to get in the shower; in a few hours, they’ve got to trek over to the Kings Arms, a restaurant in Dorchester, for the weekend’s welcome cocktails, a precursor to tomorrow night’s rehearsal dinner and Sunday’s wedding. Besides, she’s been standing here, staring at the house, for about ten minutes, ever since she set her suitcase down in the master suite and announced to her uninterested children that she needed a bit of air. And that was true—she did need air—particularly after being cooped up in that car for three hours, smelling the fish and cigarettes on her son’s breath. But she also came out here for some space to breathe, and blink, and generally just exist without fear of her children’s incessant scrutiny. When did they become like this? she wonders. For how long have they been ascribing secret meanings and clandestine messages to each and every thing Donna does? She wants to tell them that she’s not that deep, that she no longer has the energy to be manipulative or conniving. She wants to tell them that, sometimes, a sigh is just a sigh.