avenging attorney—” he gave the title a broad American accent “—who might be more interested in that kind of thing while Uncle Davey just stuck to the daily dole of events from his newspaper.”
“Let me pour his sugarless tea first,” the girl suggested.
Before Davey could prepare himself for a further salvo a new voice entered what by now could reasonably be termed “the fray.” It was Davey’s plump and bustling Cousin Alyson who swayed in his direction, scattering multiple packages onto sofa and chairs while allowing a goodly portion of her wares to drop to the carpet.
“Now, Davey, dear,” she chided, “I hope you haven’t been quarrelling with the children. They were so looking forward to your arrival. Quentin was determined that Nigel look his most beautiful and Hester baked her biscuits—what do you call them, cookies, isn’t it?— as she knows how much you love ginger, just as your mother did.”
“How odd,” he commented, “considering they were both quite ignorant of the fact I never take sugar in my tea.”
“Uncle Davey says it’s part of the ancient Cornish religion to hate sugar in tea,” the pipsqueak sprawled on the carpet contributed. “He also says—”
“Uncle Davey can speak for himself, Quentin. Besides, I don’t want a recap of anyone’s conversation. I heard enough coming in. Davey, did you have a good flight?”
Davey sighed with the effort of reply. He was invariably depressed by his cousin’s refusal, perhaps inability, to come to grips with anything. On the other hand, he reflected quickly, he could readily sympathize if she was merely striving to put distance between her and her mewling pups and their idiot blather.
“The flight was as unpleasant as I’d expected. No surprises. As long as the airlines remain determined to disturb sleep with their gross interruptions, long nocturnal flights will never be comfortable.” He slumped back, satisfied that the observation, even if pompous, put space between himself and her offspring. However, he was forgetting their tenacity, not to say their impertinence!
“One mustn’t forget, Mumsie, that Uncle Davey first went to America by sailing ship,” Hester said. “It’s hard to adjust when you get older. At least that’s what Grandma was always saying when she moved in with us and started her nonstop complaining.” She started to circulate both cups of poured tea and plates of gingersnaps as if she were presiding at some sedate garden party. She served Davey first.
He felt too fatigued—probably a further wave of jet lag added to his irritation—to deal with Hester’s juvenile barbs. In fact, the self-image that clumped through his weary mind was one of those bulls of Pamplona—only one that was too long in the tooth to effectively vent its spleen against its puerile persecutors. In any case, Cousin Alyson, in her pacifically determined way, wasn’t about to encourage feuding in her presence, although Davey thought she was motivated by a pathetic hunger to preserve family unity rather than defend her cousin from these vengeful little ageists.
So abandoning antagonisms, Davey let Alyson’s words ooze over him, rather like the sun-warmed fringe of surf back home would sometimes trickle through his toes. Her kids, irritated, he suspected, by her gentle forbearance with the likes of her gay relative, began to disperse. First Quentin gathered up his canine toiletries and, with placid Nigel obediently at his heels, left for his “study” at the top of the house. Then Hester announced she wanted to see her favourite TV program, which was a series, she duly informed her second cousin, called Tragedies of the Century from theTitanic to theHindenburg, and followed in her brother’s wake.
A few seconds of silence ensued as Alyson moved to the chair her daughter had vacated and then initiated a discussion on their late Aunt Hannah, although that was only after a mild preliminary sparring over something Davey knew from long experience she’d bring up, even while praying she wouldn’t.
“You’ll stay with us, of course? The children have your room all prepared.”
“Alyson, I didn’t even know they’d be home. In any case, I booked in at the Gresham as usual. But I already told you that over the phone. Ken and I like the independence. We stayed there even when my parents were alive. It has nothing to do with affection or anything like that.”
“I just thought…what with the funeral and our being her only living relatives.” She sniffed, and for one awful moment he thought she was going to cry.
“You know very well, my dear, that if she hadn’t been spending the summers with us in recent years I’d hardly be here myself. After all, she was only our aunt by marriage. By the way, I quite understand your not coming down there with me. It would be sheer sentimentality. And as far as those kids are concerned, rank hypocrisy!”
At least that got her off the staying-under-her-roof business, he exalted. Then, with a fresh burst of reproach emphasizing the worry lines of her face, she sought to excuse her absence from the funeral. “I would’ve gone, if you’d insisted, Davey Whatever you say, my dear, she was still our Aunt Hannah. It’s just that tomorrow happens to be my busiest. I could even have juggled my shut-ins with Mrs. Armstrong and taken hers next week. But tomorrow is Allen’s birthday, and they phoned from St. Bride’s to say he was having one of his better spells and might even recognize me if I were to bring him presents from his brother and sister and bake him a birthday cake.” She paused. “He…he didn’t last year.” Then, as if to cheer them both up, she added, “At any rate, he isn’t being violent this time.”
As she talked about her schizophrenic son, Davey sat mute. He withheld eye contact, too. Allen was rarely mentioned. That was the final tragedy in an excessively scarred life that had included an early and abrupt single parenthood from her husband’s bloody expiry in an auto accident in Normandy, and the subsequent presence of her mother who had easily earned the title of monster during those intolerable years the lady had stayed with Alyson and the three young children in NOtting Hill, after quitting Falmouth on the wings of widowhood from a henpecked husband.
All of that was now stale if still depressing knowledge for Davey. Sometimes he thought it should have linked them more firmly, especially in a family where bonds were so close to being manacles. But although Alyson was only ten years his junior—she’d married late—her woes seemed to have forever placed her out front in the family quest for inimitable martyr in the race for who bore the heaviest crown. Indeed, by comparison, he knew they weren’t only leagues apart in that particular competition—his own life with Ken appearing idyllic in comparison—but in so many other ways it seemed they had inhabited differing worlds since adulthood separated them. And he knew that meant far more than geography.
His own degree of weaning from Cornwall had begun forty years earlier and had surely been invigorated by a near-lifetime on another continent that might as well have been another planet—and with a mate whose roots were as firmly planted in California as his own were in Cornwall. Yet, deep down, he was sorely aware he was still bedevilled by his place of birth, a place she had managed to so facilely shed for the lure of London and what he secretly called her acquired English values. He was always aware that she persisted in referring to the county of Cornwall, a wholly accurate designation, while he clung to the misleading, because less specific, duchy of Cornwall for its romantic Royalist and literary allusions.
He clenched hands until he felt nails digging into palms. Surely, he told himself, it was significant that he alone was going to bury Aunt Hannah on the morrow. Alyson and her offspring—whatever the excuses—were not.That was all the accuracy of place he felt he needed. He’d be there; they wouldn’t.
But all that said, his irritation with her kids also notwithstanding, they still shared something
