“We’re so lucky,” she said, “to know someone who cooks as well as you do, Matt.”
His heart swelled helplessly. Fu waddled in, and instead of ignoring him as she usually did, Chloe knelt down and hugged him. Rolling onto his side, he made a quiet crooning that sounded like the expression of feelings remarkably similar to Matthew’s own at that moment: a grief-suffused love.
“Did you get what you were looking for?” he asked.
Her look of joy faded, and he immediately regretted forcing her back into her lie.
“I think so,” she said.
He thought of asking her if he could see some of the pictures, but he didn’t quite have the nerve. Besides, he assumed she’d fob him off with some story about not having taken any digital photos, even though he knew for a fact that she always shot on both digital and film.
But a few minutes later, when Charlie came in, she took one of her digital cameras out of its case.
“Here, Charlie.” She turned on the monitor. “This is where I was.” She glanced at Matthew, and it seemed to him she must have sensed his suspicions.
Charlie scrolled through the pictures.
“Very pretty,” he commented.
“Take a look, Matt,” Chloe said. “This was your idea, don’t forget.”
She held the monitor up to Matthew. His heart gave a brief lurch, as if there might be a reason to expect anything other than what she showed him. It was just a mailbox on a country road by a cornfield, with a red and white Dutch barn in the background. The mailbox itself was an old-fashioned grooved metal canister painted in bright enamels with a picture of baby turkeys following their mother past a simple rendering of the same cornfield and barn. On the rustic wooden stand to which it was fastened, a clay flowerpot with a midnight-blue petunia plant had been set. Low sunlight, coming in gold across the cornfield, made the tangled flowers glow above the little scene, and the whole image was given an extra, jewel-like gleam by the monitor’s liquid crystal display.
“There,” she said, smiling gently at Matthew, and he felt like a jealous husband who has just been offered an acceptable alibi and finds himself pathetically grateful for it, even though he knows perfectly well he is still being lied to.
It really was as if he had become Charlie’s stand-in; a kind of surrogate cuckold, condemned to feel all the injury but deprived of any means of doing anything about it, even protesting.
The pictures had all been taken in the same light. Chloe must have dashed out after her assignation at the A-frame to snap them before coming home.
seven
At the beginning of August Chloe’s cousin Jana and her husband Bill rented a house on Lake Classon, a half hour’s drive from Aurelia. They arranged to visit one afternoon, along with another couple who were staying with them.
It was a hot, clear day. They brought their swim things and everyone splashed around in the pool for a while, drinking cocktails.
Jana taught psychology at a college in New Jersey. She had a round face, nothing like Chloe’s, and plump thighs that she wrapped in a towel as soon as she got out of the water. She seemed in awe of her beautiful cousin, nodding enthusiastically at everything she said. Chloe, smiling her hostess smile, asked after family members.
Bill, gray-haired, with a small snub of a nose that looked like a baby’s, was a political consultant. He and Charlie floated off on inflatable armchairs into a corner, where Matthew heard them comparing different news networks’ coverage of the Libor scandal.
The couple they’d brought along turned out to be English. Hugh was a writer of some kind, teaching for a term at Jana’s college. He seemed good-natured if somewhat abstracted, his eyes partially obscured by thick round glasses. Not shy exactly, but quiet, and rather serious, and apparently oblivious to the heat, judging from the thick tweed jacket he’d arrived in. George, as the woman called herself, owned a vintage clothing shop in London. She was tall and bony, with blades of straight black hair, and spoke in what seemed a cultivated cockney accent, her thin mouth accentuated by bright lipstick. For a while the two of them and Matthew gravitated together, swapping stories of the expat life.
“I was going out of my effing box by about March this year,” George said. “I thought winter was finally ending. And then the blizzards began! It was fun for about fourteen seconds, then you realize all it is is just piles of useless white gunk that just sit there getting covered in dog shit and soggy fags.”
“That’s why people go to Florida,” Hugh said. “Snowbirds, I believe they call them.”
“Yuck. Florida? Yuck.”
“Or the Caribbean,” Matthew said, pronouncing it in the American way.
“Caribbean?” George mimicked. “Don’t give me that! You’re as bloody English as I am!”
“All right, Caribbean.”
“Do you know it?” Hugh asked.
“A little.”
“I’m curious to go there but I’m told it’s mostly been ruined.”
“We used to go to one of the smaller islands when I was a boy,” Matthew said. “Apparently it hasn’t been developed much even now. There’s still no airport.”
“Oh, yes? Which one is that?”
Matthew hesitated.
George immediately splashed water at him.
“You don’t want to tell us, do you! He doesn’t want to tell us. Thinks we’ll cause an airport to be built and fill the place with Eurotrash.”
Matthew, who had been thinking exactly that, grinned and told them the name.
“Never heard of it,” George said. “Must be crap!”
She swam off, laughing.
“I should start the grill,” Matthew said, not wanting Hugh to feel obliged to linger. To his surprise, Hugh said he’d help.
“I think I’ll get dressed, though, first.”
Matthew waited while Hugh changed in the pool house, emerging in his jacket and trousers and a pair of heavy brown brogues.
A silence fell on them as they went out through the pool gate and crossed the lawn toward the grill. Matthew, feeling he was in some sense the host, decided it was up to him to break it. He asked Hugh what books he’d written.
“You’re not supposed to ask writers that,” Hugh said, smiling.
“Oh. Why not?”
“Because nine times out of ten you won’t have heard of any of them, which leaves you feeling like an idiot and the writer feeling like a failure.”
Matthew laughed. “Sorry!”
“But the answer is books on social history. I wrote one on the British slave trade. One on the Sheffield radicals.”
“I’m not sure I-”
“Oh, no one’s heard of them. They were part of the working-class anti-slavery movement at the end of the eighteenth century.”
“Interesting.”
“Another one on Chartist strikes and insurrections…”
They reached the grill area, off to the side of the terrace. Matthew opened a sack of charcoal and tipped the lumps into an aluminum chimney. Hugh sat down on the pile of flat stones Charlie was planning to use for his pizza oven. (They’d lain there untouched since Matthew had carried them over from the truck two weeks ago.)
“So… revolution,” Matthew said cautiously. “That’s your basic subject?”
“Well, exploitation, primarily. I think it’s a more complex phenomenon than people realize. But yes, revolt also. What about you? What’s your-”
“Restaurant business,” Matthew said. But, not wanting to get into a conversation about his ailing career, he added quickly, “Am I allowed to ask if you’re working on something now?”
Hugh shrugged, his large shoulders conveying a sort of burdened but stolid patience. He was surprisingly-considering his sensitive-looking eyes-thickset and stocky. His steel-tinged brown hair hung in a pudding bowl and looked as if it had been hacked into that shape by a pair of blunt gardening shears. His skin was mealy and pale.