Delores had a honey skin with large black eyes. Her soft dark springing hair was tied in two long plaits. She wore a jumper, ski-jacket and jeans. She did not, Susan thought, look like a child, at least not really like an English child – or not like any child from Susan’s childhood. Not like Susan, of course, not at all. Susan, at twelve, would have envied Delores her spotless complexion and slight figure, possibly her pierced ears and the little gold studs.
Delores did not smile. She seemed bored and evasive, her eyes shifting off from Susan. She didn’t bother to return Susan’s greeting.
“Is the cab waiting?” said Anne. “Good. Let’s get the bathroom, then I need a drink.”
Anne had been drinking already. She smelled of alcohol, again something Susan didn’t remember from before. Even after her nights out, Anne had never smelled of anything other than cleanness and scent, or perhaps a partner’s cigarettes.
In the bar, Anne had a double vodka tonic. Susan had a white wine spritzer. The child, when asked what she wanted, said, “Coke,” untainted either by please or thank you.
“Is she all right?” Susan said to her mother, when Delores suddenly got up and walked away. She didn’t go far, only to a fruit machine, at which she stared.
“Depends on how you class all right,” said Anne. The drink had freshened her. She sounded less husky. Face to face her U.S. accent was hardly noticeable, except on certain words – class, God, and so on.
Delores meandered back. She looked at Anne, looked away. “I wanna dollar change.”
“Dollars don’t work over here, Delores,” said Anne, briskly. “Eve gave you some English money at Kennedy, didn’t she?”
Delores blinked. She didn’t open her own small purse, a buckled denim creation.
Anne said, “She forgot then. What is it you want?”
“I wanna play that.”
Susan said, “Here, have this.”
When Delores had gone back to the machine, Susan said, “She seems a bit –”
“She is a bit. Oh boy, is she. A brat, I said.”
It was a relief to be able to have the child to talk about.
“Maybe she’s just nervous. She’s Eve Frenowsky’s niece?”
“Something like that. Look, she’s got the darn thing working. But it won’t cough up, so she’s hitting it –” Anne called across the bar, nearly stridently, “Delores, lay off!”
To Susan’s surprise, Delores turned a fixed, somehow bleached face to Anne. She nodded swiftly. She looked terrified.
“Funny kid,” said Anne. “I can’t make her out. I tried to talk to her, asked her if she was excited, coming to see her father. She shook her little head. Well, I guess she’s been over before. Eve says they’re separated, the parents. Rich as hell.” Anne shrugged. “But she is a bloody graceless child. But then kids are.”
“Are they?”
“Wait till you have one.”
Susan said, “I have waited. I don’t want children.”
Anne said, “Sensible.”
Susan thought, Is she going to say, I wish I never had?
But Anne only said, “I asked him to come, you know.”
“Wizz.”
“Yep. I knew he’d say no, and he said no. I have a feeling he is all set for a mad fling while I am over here. Some nubile eighteen-year-old. Or why stop at only one?”
“Do you think we ought to go and find the cab – he’s been waiting so long.”
“Yeah, I guess. This vodka is crap. That is one of the many benefits of the U.S., decent food, decent booze. And the vitamins, what you can get there. And the treatments.”
Susan went over to fetch Delores from the fruit machine. She hadn’t won anything. She was the sort of demanding ungiving child you expected to win.
“We’re going out to the car now, Delores.”
Delores glanced at her, away. Any fright at a raised voice was gone. But she left the machine without demur.
The driver didn’t chat now; he seemed to expect them to converse with each other, and so perhaps entertain him and feed him information.
They all squashed in the back, the child wedged uncomfortably in the middle like a thin bolster.
“Eve said she has to sit there, and the window seat on the plane. She doesn’t like other seats.”
This seemed strange, for if Delores wanted to be by the window in the plane, why not the window in the car?
Susan felt uneasy, as they breathed wine and vodka over her, talking across her inert dark head. But then, Anne had already baptised her in this, no doubt, during the flight.
“I can’t wait to see London,” said Anne. “It looks so small and old.”
Then she leaned back. She shut her eyes which were overlaid by shadow and a mascara too black for the aging tan and the white hair. The knuckles of her hands had enlarged. Probably now she could never take off Wizz’s emerald ring, even if she wanted to.
Susan gazed from the cab window, watched miles of concrete streaming past, houses and trees and a succession of disturbingly big, low planes.
When she turned to her mother again, she saw Anne had fallen asleep, her mouth slightly open.
Susan’s heart sank lower. She felt wounded, defiled, by Anne’s decay. She felt – embarrassed by her.
Then she remembered her childhood – Anne, in the bath, or varnishing her toenails. Susan wanted to cry. But she was too old herself for that.
And then Susan thought of pouring all this out to Crissie, and how Crissie would be, kind and tender, encouraging and interested, philosophical, never saying the wrong thing. Helping, wonderful Crissie.
But there could be no more indulgence in Crissie, who might after all be a dangerously crazy liar-lunatic.
I never told Crissie about Catherine, Susan thought. Everyone else, but not my grandmother. I nearly did, when she was going on about her poltergeist nonsense. Nearly then. But I didn’t.
The suburbs trailed by. Susan thought of being hurried, always late, to the house on Sundays. She thought of Catherine standing there, that last time, straight and hard and ruined.
She could see Catherine now again, in the face of Anne.
The journey
