WHEN SHE WAS a child staying in the village with her brother and her parents, Eve had sometimes gone for drives in the country with her mother. They didn’t have a car — it was wartime, they had come here on the train. The woman who ran the hotel was friends with Eve’s mother, and they would be invited along when she drove to the country to buy corn or raspberries or tomatoes. Sometimes they would stop to have tea and look at the old dishes and bits of furniture for sale in some enterprising farm woman’s front parlor. Eve’s father preferred to stay behind and play checkers with some other men on the beach. There was a big cement square with a checkerboard painted on it, a roof protecting it but no walls, and there, even in the rain, the men moved oversized checkers around in a deliberate way, with long poles. Eve’s brother watched them or went swimming unsupervised — he was older. That was all gone now — the cement, even, was gone, or something had been built right on top of it. The hotel with its verandas extending over the sand was gone, and the railway station with its flower beds spelling out the name of the village. The railway tracks too. Instead there was a fake-old-fashioned mall with the satisfactory new supermarket and wineshop and boutiques for leisure wear and country crafts.
When she was quite small and wore a great hair bow on top of her head, Eve was fond of these country expeditions. She ate tiny jam tarts and cakes whose frosting was stiff on top and soft underneath, topped with a bleeding maraschino cherry. She was not allowed to touch the dishes or the lace-and-satin pincushions or the sallow-looking old dolls, and the women’s conversations passed over her head with a temporary and mildly depressing effect, like the inevitable clouds. But she enjoyed riding in the backseat imagining herself on horseback or in a royal coach. Later on she refused to go. She began to hate trailing along with her mother and being identified as her mother’s daughter. My daughter, Eve. How richly condescending, how mistakenly possessive, that voice sounded in her ears. (She was to use it, or some version of it, for years as a staple in some of her broadest, least accomplished acting.) She detested also her mother’s habit of dressing up, wearing large hats and gloves in the country, and sheer dresses on which there were raised flowers, like warts. The oxford shoes, on the other hand — they were worn to favor her mother’s corns — appeared embarrassingly stout and shabby.
“What did you hate most about your mother?” was a game that Eve would play with her friends in her first years free of home.
“Corsets,” one girl would say, and another would say, “Wet aprons.”
Hair nets. Fat arms. Bible quotations. “Danny Boy.”
Eve always said. “Her corns.”
She had forgotten all about this game until recently. The thought of it now was like touching a bad tooth.
Ahead of them the truck slowed and without signalling turned into a long tree-lined lane. Eve said, “I can’t follow them any farther, Philip,” and drove on. But as she passed the lane she noticed the gateposts. They were unusual, being shaped something like crude minarets and decorated with whitewashed pebbles and bits of colored glass. Neither one of them was straight, and they were half hidden by goldenrod and wild carrot, so that they had lost all reality as gateposts and looked instead like lost stage props from some gaudy operetta. The minute she saw them Eve remembered something else — a whitewashed outdoor wall in which there were pictures set. The pictures were stiff, fantastic, childish scenes. Churches with spires, castles with towers, square houses with square, lopsided, yellow windows. Triangular Christmas trees and tropical-colored birds half as big as the trees, a fat horse with dinky legs and burning red eyes, curly blue rivers, like lengths of ribbon, a moon and drunken stars and fat sunflowers nodding over the roofs of houses. All of this made of pieces of colored glass set into cement or plaster. She had seen it, and it wasn’t in any public place. It was out in the country, and she had been with her mother. The shape of her mother loomed in front of the wall — she was talking to an old farmer. He might only have been her mother’s age, of course, and looked old to Eve.
Her mother and the hotel woman did go to look at odd things on those trips; they didn’t just look at antiques. They had gone to see a shrub cut to resemble a bear, and an orchard of dwarf apple trees.
Eve didn’t remember the gateposts at all, but it seemed to her that they could not have belonged to any other place. She backed the car and swung around into the narrow track beneath the trees. The trees were heavy old Scotch pines, probably dangerous — you could see dangling half-dead branches, and branches that had already blown down or fallen down were lying in the grass and weeds on either side of the track. The car rocked back and forth in the ruts, and it seemed that Daisy approved of this motion. She began to make an accompanying noise.
This was something Daisy might remember — all she might remember — of this day. The arched trees, the sudden shadow, the interesting motion of the car. Maybe the white faces of the wild carrot that brushed at the windows. The sense of Philip beside her — his incomprehensible serious excitement, the tingling of his childish voice brought under unnatural control. A much vaguer sense of Eve — bare, freckly, sun-wrinkled arms, gray- blond frizzy curls held back by a black hairband. Maybe a smell. Not of cigarettes anymore, or of the touted creams and cosmetics on which Eve once spent so much of her money. Old skin? Garlic? Wine? Mouthwash? Eve might be dead when Daisy remembered this. Daisy and Philip might be estranged. Eve had not spoken to her own brother for three years. Not since he said to her on the phone, “You shouldn’t have become an actress if you weren’t equipped to make a better go of it.”
There wasn’t any sign of a house ahead, but through a gap in the trees the skeleton of a barn rose up, walls gone, beams intact, roof whole but flopping to one side like a funny hat. There seemed to be pieces of machinery, old cars or trucks, scattered around it, in the sea of flowering weeds. Eve had not much leisure to look — she was busy controlling the car on this rough track. The green truck had disappeared ahead of her — how far could it have gone? Then she saw that the lane curved. It curved; they left the shade of the pines and were out in the sunlight. The same sea foam of wild carrot, the same impression of rusting junk strewed about. A high wild hedge to one side, and there was the house, finally, behind it. A big house, two stories of yellowish-gray brick, an attic story of wood, its dormer windows stuffed with dirty foam rubber. One of the lower windows shone with aluminum foil covering it on the inside.
She had come to the wrong place. She had no memory of this house. There was no wall here around mown grass. Saplings grew up at random in the weeds.
The truck was parked ahead of her. And ahead of that she could see a patch of cleared ground where gravel had been spread and where she could have turned the car around. But she couldn’t get past the truck to do that. She had to stop, too. She wondered if the man in the truck had stopped where he did on purpose, so that she would have to explain herself. He was now getting out of the truck in a leisurely way. Without looking at her, he released the dog, which had been running back and forth and barking with a great deal of angry spirit. Once on the ground, it continued to bark, but didn’t leave the man’s side. The man wore a cap that shaded his face, so that Eve could not see his expression. He stood by the truck looking at them, not yet deciding to come any closer.
Eve unbuckled her seat belt.
“Don’t get out,” said Philip. “Stay in the car. Turn around. Drive away.”
“I can’t,” said Eve. “It’s all right. That dog’s just a yapper, he won’t hurt me.”
“Don’t get out.”
She should never have let that game get so far Out of control. A child of Philip’s age could get too carried away. “This isn’t part of the game,” she said. “He’s just a man.”
“I know,” said Philip. “But
“Stop that,” said Eve, and got out and shut the door.
“Hi,” she said. “I’m sorry. I made a mistake. I thought this was somewhere else.”
The man said something like “Hey.”
“I was actually looking for another place,” said Eve. “It was a place where I came once when I was a little girl. There was a wall with pictures on it all made with pieces of broken glass. I think a cement wall, whitewashed. When I saw those pillars by the road, I thought this must be it. You must have thought we were following you. It sounds so silly.”
She heard the car door open. Philip got out, dragging Daisy behind him. Eve thought he had come to be close to her, and she put out her arm to welcome him. But he detached himself from Daisy and circled round Eve and spoke to the man. He had brought himself out of the alarm of a moment before and now he seemed steadier than Eve was.
“Is your dog friendly?” he said in a challenging way.
“She won’t hurt you,” the man said. “Long as I’m here, she’s okay. She gets in a tear because she’s not no more than a pup. She’s still not no more than a pup.”
