“Anyway, who needs that kind of drama,” said Roger. “I’ve had plenty of time to consider and now I’m thinking seriously about making a go of things with Gertrude.” He looked more cheerful. “There’s still a lot of mileage in leveraging an old country name like hers, and she’s always adored me. Under the right conditions, I might be prepared to make her very happy.”
“You can’t negotiate love like a commercial transaction,” said the Major, appalled.
“That’s true,” said Roger. He seemed perfectly happy again and rummaged in the bag for an apple. “Love is like a big fat bonus that you hope kicks in after you negotiate the rest of the term sheet.”
“There is no poetry in your soul, Roger,” said the Major.
“How about ‘Roses are red, / violets are blue, / Sandy is gone, / Gertrude will do’?” suggested Roger.
“It really won’t do, Roger,” said the Major. “If you don’t feel any real spark of passion for Gertrude, don’t shackle yourselves together. You’ll only be dooming both of you to a life of loneliness.” He smiled wryly to hear himself repeating Grace’s words as his own. Here he was dispensing them as advice when he had only just taken them in as revelation. So, he thought, do all men steal and display the shiny jackdaw treasure of other people’s ideas.
As the Major was preparing to leave, Roger suddenly asked him, “Where are you diving off to, anyway? Who’s this friend you’re off to visit?”
“Just someone who relocated up north. Grace wanted me to check in on her.”
“It’s that woman again,” said Roger, narrowing his eyes. “The one with the fanatic nephew.”
“Her name is Jasmina Ali,” replied the Major. “Please show enough respect to remember her name.”
“What are you doing, Dad?” said Roger. “Wasn’t the golf club fiasco enough to warn you off? She’s a bad idea.”
“Chimpanzees writing poetry is a bad idea,” said the Major. “Receiving romantic advice from you is also a bad, if not horrendous, idea. Spending an hour dropping in on an old friend is a good idea and also none of your business.”
“Old friend, my arse,” said Roger. “I saw how you looked at her at the dance. Everyone could see you were ready to make a fool of yourself.”
“And ‘everyone’ disapproved, of course,” said the Major. “No doubt because she is a woman of color.”
“Not at all,” said Roger. “As the club secretary mentioned to me in private, it’s not remotely a question of color but merely that the club doesn’t currently have any members who are in trade.”
“The club and its members can go to hell,” said the Major, spluttering in anger. “I’ll be glad to watch them throw me out.”
“My God, you’re in love with her.”
The Major’s immediate reaction was to continue to deny it. While he tried to find some intermediate response, something that would express his intention without exposing him to ridicule, Roger said, “What on earth do you hope to accomplish?” The Major felt a rage unlike anything he had felt toward his son before and he was provoked into honesty.
“Unlike you, who must do a cost-benefit analysis of every human interaction,” he said, “I have no idea what I hope to accomplish. I only know that I must try to see her. That’s what love is about, Roger. It’s when a woman drives all lucid thought from your head; when you are unable to contrive romantic stratagems, and the usual manipulations fail you; when all your carefully laid plans have no meaning and all you can do is stand mute in her presence. You hope she takes pity on you and drops a few words of kindness into the vacuum of your mind.”
“Pigs’ll fly before we see you at a loss for words,” said Roger, rolling his eyes.
“Your mother rendered me silent the first time we met. Took the witty repartee right out of my mouth and left me gaping like a fool.”
The Major remembered her thin blue dress against an intense green summer lawn and the evening sun catching at the edges of her hair. She held her sandals in one hand and a small cup of punch in the other and she was screwing up her lips against the sweet stickiness of the foul drink. He was so busy staring that he lost his way in the middle of a complicated anecdote and had to blush at the scathing guffaws of his friends, who had been depending on him for the punch line. She had pushed into the circle and asked him directly, “Is there something to drink other than this melted-lolly stuff?” It had sounded like poetry in his ear and he had steered her away to the host’s pantry and unearthed a bottle of Scotch and let her do all the talking while he tried not to gaze at her dress skimming the soft pyramids of her breasts like a scarf forever falling from a marble-sculpted wood nymph.
“What would Mother think about you chasing all over England after some shopgirl?” asked Roger.
“If you say ‘shopgirl’ one more time, I shall punch you,” said the Major.
“But what if you marry her and she outlives you?” Roger asked. “What happens if she won’t give up the house and—Well, after all the fuss you made about the Churchills, I don’t see how you can just hand everything over to a complete stranger.”
“Ah, so it isn’t a question of loyalty as much as of patrimony,” said the Major.
“It’s not the money,” said Roger indignantly. “It’s the principle of the thing.”
“These things are never neat, Roger,” said the Major. “And speaking of your mother, you were there when she begged me not to remain alone if I found someone to care for.”
“She was dying,” said Roger. “She begged you to marry again and you swore you wouldn’t. Personally, I was mad that we wasted so much valuable time on deathbed promises both of you knew were untenable.”
“Your mother was the most generous of women,” the Major said. “She meant what she said.” They were silent for a moment and the Major wondered whether Roger was also smelling again the carbolic and the roses on the bedside table and seeing the greenish light of the hospital room and Nancy’s face, grown as thin and beautiful as a painted medieval saint, with only her eyes still burning with life. He had struggled in those last hours, as had she, to find words that were not the merest of platitudes. Words had failed him then. In the awful face of death, which seemed so near and yet so impossible, he had choked on speech as if his mouth were full of dry hay. Poems and quotations, which he had remembered using to soothe others on those useless condolence notes and in the occasional eulogy, seemed specious and an exercise of his own vanity. He could only squeeze his wife’s brittle hand while the useless pleadings of Dylan Thomas, “Do not go gentle into that good night…,” beat in his head like a drum.
“Are you all right, Dad? I didn’t mean to be harsh,” said Roger, bringing him blinking to his senses. He focused his eyes and braced one hand on the back of Roger’s couch.
“Your mother is gone, Roger,” the Major said. “Your uncle Bertie is gone. I don’t think I should waste any more time.”
“Maybe you’re right, Dad,” said Roger. He seemed to think for a moment, which the Major found unusual, and then he came around the couch and held out his hand. “Look, I wish you luck with your lady friend,” he said. “Now, how about you wish me luck at Ferguson’s shoot? You know how much this Enclave deal means to me.”
“I appreciate the gesture,” said the Major, shaking hands. “It means a lot to me. I do wish you luck, son. I’ll do whatever I can to support you up there.”
“I was hoping you’d say that,” said Roger. “Since I’m going up early, there may be some wildfowling, Gertrude says. So how about letting me take up the Churchills?”
As the Major drove away from Roger’s cottage, leaving his gun box with his delighted son, he had a sinking feeling that he had been manipulated once again. In his mind images played in a tiresome loop. Roger crouched in a duck boat in the foggy dawn. Roger rising to fire at a soaring flock of mallards. Roger toppling backward over the metal bench into the scuppers. Roger dropping a Churchill, with the smallest of splashes, into the fathomless waters of the loch.
Chapter 21
Would Don Quixote or Sir Galahad have been able to maintain his chivalrous ardor for the romantic quest, wondered the Major, if he had been forced to crawl bumper-to-bumper through an endless landscape of traffic
