The day my parents left, we left Savary for good and began traveling.
But before this, we had one day — this is very strange, it’s the last day I remember really clearly — when somehow everything was slightly better. Not all right at all, but one day we made jokes and actually laughed at them. A day of grace. We knew that something very, very terrible had happened, but it seemed to have happened to someone else, perhaps to someone very dear to people dear to us, a friend of a friend we’d always heard stories about. There was sadness in the house, but it didn’t have us by the throat. Even as it happened, I wondered what it meant. Was it possible that already we were returning to ourselves?
Things got much worse after that.
The journey from Duras to Holt — from the farmhouse by a vineyard in France to a four-bedroom cottage not too far from the North Sea — was Odyssean. That felt right. It felt good to do hard physical travel away from. . away from everything. First we drove north to a small village near Angoulême, where we spent two nights with old friends of Edward’s — dear friends of mine now, too — and where I was very poor company.
Then we drove to Nantes, to drop off our rented Peugeot. Then we caught a train, and then a bus, to Roscoff, where we spent the night in a hotel looking over the harbor and wandered around all day until it was time to catch the overnight ferry to England. We got off at Portsmouth and took the train to Penzance, where Edward’s parents picked us up. We spent three nights at their time-share in Cornwall, where I continued to be poor company, rode with them to London, two nights there, took the train to Suffolk, where we met up with Edward’s parents again at their house. Three days later, in my mother-in-law’s loaned VW, we drove to Holt.
Somewhere in there was Mother’s Day. We were with the friends near Angoulême. I lurked in a far doorway and smoked and drank wine by myself. My parents were still in France, and I had to call my mother to wish her a happy day, but I didn’t want to. Was I a mother, I asked myself, and despite Lib’s beautiful e-mail I still don’t know the answer. I want to tell that sad version of myself, Of course you’re a mother, just one who’s learned a hard lesson. I want to tell that sad version of myself, I’m sorry, no, it’s tough luck, he died before you met him, people keep track of such things, and if we call you a mother, then where does it stop? It was the uncertainty that seemed unbearable to me. Even now. This year I had a very glorious baby with me, but was it my first Mother’s Day, or my second?
Those weeks were miserable with company and travel, with luggage and making conversation, but they were forward movement. One step farther, one step farther.
We almost had to take one mammoth step back. Immigration at the ferry terminal in Portsmouth was a single thin man behind a single thin podium. His days must have been dull, waving on one EU passport after another, the French coming to England, the English returning home, an occasional intrepid German, none of whom could be stopped and questioned. When he saw my U.S. passport, he perked up.
“Are you traveling alone?”
“No,” I said. I gestured to Edward, who’d gone ahead. “With my husband, who’s an English citizen.”
This is, by the way, not a useful thing to say, and it’s not the first time I’ve gotten in trouble with Her Majesty’s Border Guards: three and a half years before, a woman at Heathrow asked me the purpose of my visit, and I had said, cheerily, “I’m getting married!” The English are as suspicious of undocumented spouses of citizens as the Americans are: they worry you will assume a certain level of privilege and never get around to sorting yourself out legally. At Heathrow the woman made me sit down on a bench for a long time, next to an athlete from Ghana who was likewise waiting for clearance, and let me through only after a long lecture about not overstaying my six-month tourist allowance. In Portsmouth, the thin border guard perked up further, in the manner of a dog who, already sitting up straight, sits up straighter to show that he’s obeying a command and deserves a biscuit. In fact he looked like a Jack Russell terrier with dreams of being promoted to bloodhound. He began to leaf through my passport.
“It looks to me as though you’ve spent most of the last two years in the United Kingdom,” he said with a certain joy. I couldn’t figure out how he’d arrived at this theory.
“No,” I answered truthfully. “Three weeks a year, at the most.”
“Well, that’s not what it looks like to me,” he said.
We went back and forth. My years as a librarian always help me in such situations: I am very good at keeping my cool with officious, insistent strangers, though my training is on the other side of the desk. I was miraculously polite. Even so it seemed for a while that he might put me on the next ferry back to France. What will I do? I wondered. I pictured myself alone on the ferry, having been manhandled on board by some as yet unseen immigration thug. I tried to explain myself, I tried to remember the exact dates and circumstances of my handful of visits to England. Again and again he told me that it seemed that I’d been illegally living in the United Kingdom. I shifted from foot to foot for forty-five minutes as he did his best to catch me in an inconsistency.
When, exactly, might we be moved to unpack the shoulder bag, show him the death certificate of very recent vintage, open the tiny blue nylon sack, and pull out the wooden urn of ashes with the brass plaque underneath that said, Pudding Harvey, Bordeaux, 2006? Look, we might have said, something terrible has happened to us. Grant us a tiny bit of grace no matter what you think.
Two things saved us. First, I explained that Edward planned to immigrate to the United States at the end of the summer.
“Have you begun that process?” he said.
I reeled off the name and number of every single form I’d filled out.
Then he asked us what we did for a living, and I said tiredly, “We’re writers.”
He perked up again, like a Jack Russell terrier who dreams of being a famous Jack Russell terrier. I’d seen that look before: As it happens, I fancy myself a writer.
“Books?” he asked.
“Yes,” I said. “I’ve published three, and my husband has published two.”
That seemed to do the trick. He took down the particulars of my passport, stamped it, wrote down a code, and waved us through. We were almost free when he called out —
“Would I find your books in a bookstore?”
“Yes,” I said as pleasantly as I could, backing away from him. I could smile for only so long. I was worried I’d wasted my year’s supply on this man.
23
Here is a character from a gothic noveclass="underline" the woman with the stillborn child. Her hair is matted and black. Ghosts nest in it. Her white nightgown is mottled with blood. In her hands is an awful bundle: the corpse she cannot bear to put down. She sings lullabies to it, rocks it in her arms. She says in a pleasant but tremulous voice, Would you like to see my baby? He’s such a nice little baby. Such a little, little baby. Shh: he’s sleeping.