The View from Here - Couverture rigide

Mckinlay, Deborah

Couverture rigide

ISBN 10 : 1569478716 ISBN 13 : 9781569478714

Editeur : Soho Press, 2011

Synopsis

When Frances was twenty-two, she was drifting, scraping by giving English lessons in Mexico, when she met up with a glamorous group of vacationing Americans staying in a mansion on a private beach. Two decades later in rural England, she discovers a love letter from a younger woman addressed to her husband almost at the same time as she learns that she’s facing a life-threatening illness.
 
As her contented existence begins to unravel and she tries to decide how and if she will confront her husband about his infidelity, Frances finds herself haunted by the memory of her heady desert encounter with the charmed circle of the Severance family. That summer in 1976 seemed, until now, like another lifetime. As she recalls this long buried episode from her past, she is forced to face for the first time her own role in an illicit romance and the betrayal and tragedy that marked its ending.

A propos du livre

À propos de l'auteur

Deborah McKinlay has published half a dozen nonfiction titles in the UK, and her books have been translated into numerous languages. Her work has appeared in British Vogue, Cosmopolitan, and Esquire. She lives in South West England. The View from Here is her first novel.

Extrait. © Reproduit sur autorisation. Tous droits réservés.

T h e mi dwi n t e r s h e r e are never pale. Paleness
suggests translucence, and our winters are swampy,
no hint of crisp blue overhead. Just now, near
Christmas, there is gray rain and a slip of mud at every
doorway, and I am thinking a great deal about death.
The season, its associations with joy and birth, denies me
the opportunity to speak of such a smothering topic, despite
the circumstances, despite my hope, which is to die, softly and
soon. Of course even once the fresh twelve months is upon
us, I will not express this wish, not in words, at least not to
Phillip or Chloe. I suspect, anyway, that they know and that
it is this knowledge that hushes them sometimes and hurries
them from my presence, though they never confront me with
it, or anything else. I am fragile now, as glass, in their eyes.
No matter the rage of my thoughts.

o n e
• d e b o r a h m c k i n l a y •
2

I remember the pain, the first that signaled this ending. I
remember it quite vividly; it came not long after last Christmas
on a day as dull as this one. Evidently we remember things
because they are anchored in some way, but anchoring is a
weighty concept, and I was, just then, in the grip of something
shrill . . . panic. I was reading a letter.

The letter was signed Josee, like that, with an ee. I knew
who Josee was, but the ee fixated me, since it signaled so
clearly the age of the signer, until the pain interrupted and
shook my concentration for a half beat. Nobody over forty
is called Josee with an ee, are they? Though of course, soon
enough, that must change. As I said, I knew who Josee was,
so her youth was already familiar to me, and had seemed, in
that different context, unremarkable, but at that moment it
glared, suddenly scarlet. I stared at her signature—fat and
a little wild—for a few more unwinding moments, though
it was the line above it that held the real clout, and then
left off the slow distracted pat that my left hand had set up
at my midline, the pain having receded into what doctors
call “discomfort.”

I folded the letter and put it back in its envelope. And
I put the envelope back into the drawer of my husband’s
desk, Phillip’s desk, where I had found it. Where I had gone
looking for it, or something like it—something that would
tell me what it had told me.

I will be forty-six years old next July, if I live until then,
which I doubt. Almost no age at all if you look at it from a
mathematical perspective. To me, though, forty-six seems
fairly aged, perhaps because my forty-plus years have afforded
me so many lives, this last the most content and therefore
the least notable of all. That is, until Josee’s letter came, and

• t h e v i e w f r o m h e r e •
3

the discomfort came, and with those things the story and,
worse, the reminders of stories past.

• • •

Richard Luke was a scrubbed-looking man, athletic and
good-schoolish. His coloring was fair, the kind that tends to
redden slightly with sunlight, and his features, though handsome
enough, were so even that they rendered him not commonplace
exactly, but unexceptional. He looked as though he
should be advertising something wholesome. When he asked
what had brought me there he dropped the x in Mexico.
“A boyfriend,” I replied, shrugging to complete the
explanation.

“Mexican?”

“At heart,” I answered.

It was the woman to my left who laughed in response. She
was Richard’s wife, Patsy, and her magazine-cover lips were
tilted into a suggestive curve.

I laughed too.

It was a cocktail party, delicately backlit pink, the temperature
clement enough to encourage bare shoulders among the
women, and the sounds of ice cubes against glass and water
against the stone of a courtyard fountain wove in and out of
the easy small talk. The year was 1976, and Mexico was a
place where people went looking for a good time.
Six carefree, attractive Americans to whom I had recently
been introduced were strung along the happy balcony.
Watching them exercising their practiced charm on a few of
the better-heeled locals, I decided that they were probably
always having a good time.

• d e b o r a h m c k i n l a y •
4

Patsy Luke quit laughing and drifted toward a woman
called Bee Bee Newson. I had caught Bee Bee’s eye a little
earlier and had felt, just slightly, appraised by her. She was a
thin woman with a thin face, though the thinness was offset
by the thickness of her hair, which was that ash blonde color
that is only ever achieved with professional help. It hung
straight and grazed her collarbones and her eyebrows and
emphasized the shaded quality of her eyes. They had caught
mine only momentarily before she had swung away, leaving
me with the rear view of her expensive-looking outfit, white
trousers and bright silk top, and a large gold bracelet that
evidently annoyed her. She kept raising her arm and shaking
her hand to adjust its position on her wrist.

Cornered then by the juxtaposition of a stone pillar and
Richard’s elbow, I began, a little headily, to flirt with him.
I was almost two months out of a dreary breakup from the
boyfriend I had mentioned and I was young, and conscious
that my white dress showed off my tan.

The flirtation, though, rewarded by too bland an attractiveness,
didn’t command my energy for long and my happy
mood might have faltered had Richard not, with the clamp
of an innocently sporty hand on my upper arm, twisted me
toward the beaming moon-face of Maria Rodriguez, our
hostess.

“Lovely party,” he said.

Two high points of thrilled color were set burning in
Maria’s plump cheeks. She nodded shyly.

At the other end of the balcony Bee Bee’s husband, Ned,
raised his voice, uniting the gathering. “Nice place you have
here, Señor Rodriguez.”

Arturo Rodriguez lifted his hand in a dismissive thank-you

• t h e v i e w f r o m h e r e •
5

and looked pleased. There wasn’t a nicer house for five hundred
miles, except one, which he knew, as he knew everything
about that region. There was, some twenty minutes’ drive
distant, a butter-colored palace, set in high-walled, glamourtinged
privacy above a crystal sand beach. Anyone who ever
walked on that beach pointed and looked up.

Arturo liked to know people who spent time in houses like
that, so when he had heard that an American couple called
the Severances, who now stood not three feet from him,
were vacationing there, he had wasted no time in advising
Maria that she must give a little party. I was Maria’s English
teacher, one of the few English speakers she knew. And that
was how I had come to be standing among the well-tended
foliage and black wrought iron with Richard and Patsy Luke
and Ned and Bee Bee Newson, who were in turn guests of
the Severances, Mason and Sally. They all looked as if they
breakfasted habitually beneath orange trees.

Mason Severance had been slipped to my side by the subtle
repositioning that interruptions create at parties. He was a
striking man whose silver brown hair had been cropped a
little shorter than was fashionable then. In profile he could
have graced a gold coin, or a poster for some sort of epic
movie. He was thumbing the paper napkin wrapping his
empty glass absently. There was something terribly intense
about him, apparent in even so slight a gesture.

“Is there much work here,” he asked, “for an English
teacher?” He made “English teacher” sound exotic.

“Enough,” I said. It was a lie. I almost never worked.

“And you like living here?”

“Yes, I do.”

“Well, if you find yourself out in our neck of the woods

• d e b o r a h m c k i n l a y •
6

any time feel free to come in and say something charming.”
Ned said joining us. He was grinning.

I grinned back. He had that quality that children and
women warm to, an avuncular combination of humor and
kindness. He was thin like his wife, but in him it was rangy.
He looked as though he could tap dance, and whistle in tune,
and make corned beef hash from a secret recipe. I already
liked him.

“Have you seen the house?” Mason asked. It was the kind
of house you could refer to in that way, simply. It was famous
and had warranted, I’d heard, a five-page spread in House &
Garden.

“Only from the beach,” I answered, meeting his gaze.
“Come for lunch on Sunday,” Sally Severance cut in.
I looked at her directly then, drawn by the command in her
voice, but in fact I had been half watching her for much of the
evening. She was the most beautiful woman I had ever seen.
“Yes,” her husband confirmed, “you should.”
“Thank you,” I replied.

My glass was empty now too. I handed it to Maria’s maid
and saw, from the corner of my eye, Maria gesturing with
a flappy one-handed motion for her employee to circulate
with more drinks. But the maid didn’t seem to notice, and
anyway, the party was fading. In the west the sky’s mauve
tint had deepened.

Sally shut her eyes briefly, concentrating it seemed on the
ice she had taken with the last mouthful of her drink. Then
she looked up and, with very little disturbance of her flawless
face, shot a glance at her husband. He, immediately catching
the message in it, set his own glass down and said in a farewell
tone, “Sunday, then.”

• t h e v i e w f r o m h e r e •
7

They left, the six of them, amid much fluttering from
Maria and a great deal of hand pumping from Arturo. I stood
on the curved steps and watched them go. At the gate Bee
Bee tottered slightly in her delicate shoes and almost tripped.
Ned steadied her and, turning, waved his free arm and called,
“See ya, Frankie.”

I smiled. It was the first time anyone had ever called me
anything but Frances.

• • •

Many years later, in a rearranged world where I am once
again known by the name my parents selected, twenty-seven
days elapsed between my discovery of the letter signed Josee
and the afternoon that I went to Doctor Griffith’s duncolored
office in Barnham with my husband. She had asked
us to come together, telephoning me after a routine visit the
week before. The pain, though no worse, had been constant,
and I had mentioned it to her. You don’t think, do you, in
those moments that they will change your life? She had sent
me for tests.

Even our joint summons did not alert me to what was to
come. I was preoccupied with other things, other concerns.
Phillip parked the car neatly between the two white lines
nearest to the medical center’s automated glass doors and
then, in the busy waiting area, we sat for a few minutes, side
by side on blue vinyl, thinking our own thoughts. Then
we were called, and told what we were told. You don’t really
take it in. Or I didn’t, not then.

I have wondered sometimes since what went through
Phillip’s mind as we listened to those words, smoothly

• d e b o r a h m c k i n l a y •
8

delivered in Dr. Griffith’s even tone—a considered weld
of concern and reassurance and professionalism—whether
perhaps, like me, he felt that he was being punished, though
for a recent transgression rather than one long past, as in
my case.

Anyway, she said what she said and asked for our questions
and then, with clean efficiency, set the great train rolling, the
great thundering train that takes over your life when you have
the sort of tumor that I have.

In the twilight time between the first set of investigations
and the scheduled longer hospital stay for the initial attempt
at treatment, cure even, we went to Italy and stayed in a pretty
hotel on a pretty lake, its blue blurred to dove at the edges by
fog because of the time of year.

On the second morning of our stay I wanted my green
scarf. It is the scarf that goes with my cream coat, and I
wanted it very much, but I couldn’t find it. I turned out all
the drawers, neat and organized and almost empty, as they
only ever are on holidays, and then I hauled our suitcases out
from the back of the wardrobe and searched those. Eventually
I realized that I had forgotten the scarf and I sat on the edge
of the bed and shook, and then I began to sob.

Phillip said, sitting beside me, “We’ll get you a new scarf,
darling, a beautiful new scarf.” His tears began then too,
stifling mine. “Everything will be all right,” he said through
them.

And I thought, It will. We’ll make it all all right. It was not
my illness that was uppermost in my mind at the time.
I had told no one about Josee’s letter, not even Catherine
or Sonia, my closest friends, which is strange I suppose given

• t h e v i e w f r o m h e r e •
9

the amount of talk, and all the rest that marriage and children
and life throws up to women, that has passed between us over
the years. But I had not been able to face any sort of telling
out loud. That would have elicited advice, and judgment, and
discussion, until the thing had grown to the point that I’d
have had to unload it, confront Phillip, and I did not have
the energy. That sort of confrontation demands passion and
blood and youth, and mine had been draining from me.
Of course the fact that I had buried the knowledge, and
worse the gradual understanding, that my husband was
unfaithful did not alter the fact of it. The thing did not disappear,
or reform into some new easier-to-handle shape, or
even lie dormant, but festered instead, emerging in that kind
of sharpness that women have so much more readily at their
tongue-tips than men.

Verbally, I had always been mercury to Phillip’s molasses
and it had been impossible, with what I knew coiled tense
inside me, with Josee’s letter repeating itself in my head,
not to spring at him from time to time, not to sting him a
little when the opportunity presented itself, as inevitably it
did. We are a man and a woman married twenty years, after
all, and finely tuned to each other’s failings, no matter how
slight. But then, more than once, in the middle of some petty,
terrier-tongued attack I was struck by the possibility that my
malice would be reported to another with whom novelty and
unavailability were still oiling the way for constant, soothing
affection. And so I attempted to wrap my razors in cotton
wool, alternating my small meannesses with anxious gushes
of geniality. It is unfair, isn’t it, the way that the betrayed are
so often wrenched into behavior that makes them ridiculous,
behavior that helps to justify the betrayal?

• d e b o r a h m c k i n l a y •
10

Phillip was no more evenhanded with me, switching bouts
of criticism with displays of affection that smacked of trying
too hard, settling often into long, distracted silences. Things
had been that way for several months. A sort of electrified
space had grown up between us, primed to spark into some
ghastly, goalless argument. The kind that leads to nothing
but exhaustion and waste.

But then, unexpectedly, there we were, hand in hand on
that big bed in the honey-lit Italian hotel room, husband
and wife again, a new tie binding us. A new challenge had
been added to the bonds that living together and sleeping
together and losing people and crying and raising a child
together had already wrought. And I decided that it would be
possible to banish this other woman, an outsider, a trespasser,
both from my mind and from our lives, and to start over.
It was very easy during the soft days that followed to settle
on this resolution. They were so pleasant. Full of wine and
long lunches and meandering walks along pastel alleyways
to the lakeside, all designed not to tax me. We went on ferry
rides, Phillip winding my new scarf—the color of the lake
beneath—carefully around my neck. A gauzy tenderness
descended between us, blunting the edges of our talk and
turning our lovemaking gossamer. I believed us to be in one
of those fresh-start phases that characterizes long marriages,
the links a little delicate, but the purpose shared.
I thought that way until, arriving back in England, I
queued to buy tissues in the airport and, turning from the
kiosk, saw Phillip speaking on the telephone. He was at one
of a quartet of those curved plastic booths that shield only
the upper half of the body. He was leaning against the molded
exterior and I could see his face. What was it about him,

• t h e v i e w f r o m h e r e •
11

about his manner, that warned me, even across the acres of
strangers and hospital-lit serviceable surfaces? His eyes were
dipped, almost closed, and his expression was intense, urgent
even, utterly engrossed. Suddenly, sensing my gaze perhaps,
he lifted his head and hung up, and then he roved his eyes,
scanning for mine. On catching them, he sent me a cheerful,
childish wave that I felt myself hate him for and he lumbered
toward me, battling with the luggage trolley. Then we left
together, he leading the way to the taxi stand.

Détails de l'édition

• Éditeur: Soho Press
• Date d'édition: 2011
• Langue: anglais
• ISBN 10: 1569478716
• ISBN 13: 9781569478714
• Reliure: Relié
• Nombre de pages: 272
• Coordonnées du fabricant: non disponible
• Personne responsable: Goron Joel; +33645070543; goron.ventes.net@gmail.com; ; 31 rue de Rennes 50170 pontorson; 4 la Touche; PARAY LE MONIAL CEDEX; 71609; France