Three Junes Read online

  Paul watched Maureen extinguish her cigarette on the sole of a shoe and tuck the end into the cuff of a coatsleeve. She was looking out the windscreen when she said, “I for one would never want a military man—the kind, I mean, who lives for that life. Not if he was the Second Coming incarnate.”

  “A fierce opinion,” said Paul.

  “I’m twenty-six. An old maid, Mum drones on. A cloudy marble. Too set in my ways, she says—that dirge.” She laughed, a sharp summery laugh.

  “And what would you trade it for, this independence you so clearly prize?” Paul was twenty-five. He was likely, in a year or so, to marry one of two girls he knew, both daughters of friends of his father, both lovely and suspiciously compliant.

  Maureen laughed again and leaned into her seat. She accepted another cigarette from Paul and let him light it. She stroked her dog, her affection absentminded—second nature, guessed Paul. “Leave aside the deserving man? For a big old house in the country. I’d trade for that. For a brood of sons, that too.” She paused. “Five—four would do, four sons. Daughters turn against you faster, that’s what I hear. Boys adore their mothers. . . . And, you’ll laugh, but collies. Not the sheep—or maybe a few, for training the dogs—but just the collies, for themselves. I’d have a kennel, a dozen at least. Grandfather had them on his farm, out by Hawick. Marcus here’s the end of that line. I remember watching those dogs work the herd, back and forth, back and forth, like shuttles on a loom. . . .” Her hands darted to and fro, the cigarette glow a snake in the dark. “But to raise ’em purely for trials, for the competition alone, that takes money.”

  “Collies,” he said, to fill the silence. The word sounded as foreign as the name of the Canadian outpost now melting away on the windscreen.

  “Well, first ghosts, now collies. Daft, what? My wild imagination again,” said Maureen. “Better commit me, Lieutenant.” She squeezed his arm quickly, opened the door, and dropped her cigarette in the gutter. After stepping out, she leaned down to thank him. Patient and coaxing, she wrapped her long arms around Marcus and eased him down onto his feet.

  “RALLY UP, CREW. Refreshments around the bend,” calls Jack, dismounting from his donkey. He beckons energetically to the stragglers. They have reached the grove after a hot, wracking ride up the mountainside, and even Marjorie, coming in close behind Paul, looks beaten. “You’re a wicked, wicked man,” she says to Jack when she is on her feet. Her white blouse is dusty, with drooping oval stains beneath her arms.

  “Said you were a horsewoman, Marj.”

  “I believe that means I ride horses, young man.”

  Jack laughs and puts an arm around her. “No pain, no terrain.” He helps Irene off her saddle, then Jocelyn. Their husbands, Ray and Solly, are halfway to the rest hut. The quadruplets stayed behind to loll about at the beach. “No beer!” Jack shouts after the men. “I want no casualties on the way down!” Paul waits while Jack tethers the donkeys. The grove is smaller than he expected, a cluster of cowering, wind-battered trees. A sad, dessicated little place, hardly worth the climb. Except for two other donkeys drowsing nearby, there is no sign that anyone else has made this ridiculous trek.

  “Don’t look now,” says Jack, “but it’s the Andrews Sisters.”

  Paul follows his glance, past the table where their group is seated. He sees her hat first, that extravagant hat. The friend, who leads her toward the entrance to the grove, gesticulates wildly. He can just hear the lilt of her voice. “Extraordinary kimonos!” he hears, “. . . inconsolable weeping!”

  “Not much of a ‘valley,’” says Paul.

  “No, but wait, bucko.” Jack takes a bottle of water from his shoulder bag. He drinks half, then hands it to Paul, who drinks the rest.

  Paul follows the flagstone path to the grove, overtaking his companions. As he steps through the gate, he feels instantly cooled. Here is the first small breeze, the first shade in hours: an acute and unexpected pleasure. Where the trees begin, the ground dips down—a modest crater more than a valley—and the brownish leaves make a rattling noise, like wind in a field of maize. He follows a dirt path, turns a corner, and gasps. The rattling comes from a stick with which a short man is beating the branches. Abruptly, the air fills with a scarlet haze, like a cyclone of vermilion confetti, the rain of petals tossed at the end of a wedding.

  He thinks of the jungle and its sudden surprises. Years ago, in Guatemala, he stood with his son and a group of journalists, admiring a ruined temple, when someone laughed or raised his voice. Out of nowhere, all around them rose a funnel of color—red, orange, turquoise, violet—a startled swarm of parrots.

  Through the red blur, there are flashes of the one girl’s hat, the other girl’s shirt, the man’s arm as he thrashes the trees. Infinitesimal wings touch Paul’s face, the air is alive, but the only sound in all this commotion is the rattling stick. He would have expected noise, the applause of birds rising in flight, but the moths are stone silent. Their color is noise enough. And then, gradually, they settle back onto the branches and vanish. Closed up, like twigs or buds, they are invisible. Again, the place is parched and brown, nowhere special. The short man stands close to Paul, probably hoping he’ll pay for another go-round. At the opposite edge of the clearing, both girls are still immersed in their ecstasy, eyes half closed, faces lifted solemnly, glowing.

  HE WAITED, and Maureen agreed it was only proper, until his father had died. His sisters, both married and settled in Edinburgh, were unhappy—and shocked, they told Paul, at how callously he could dispose of their legacy—but neither was in a position to stake any claim. Their mother, her reticent self, took no one’s side. Within two months the family house was sold, furniture divided, and Paul had found a place for his own family out in the country, half an hour from town. The house was called Tealing. It was skirted on one side by a burn and an overgrown meadow; on the other by a tall hedgerow, shielding another large house, the only one within sight of theirs—occupied, the agent said, by a widow who looked after herself.

  Fenno was eight, and the twins, Dennis and David, were six. The three of them roared and clattered through the wide halls and across the lawn playing bomber planes or Panzer tanks—denting banisters, felling chairs, maiming shrubs. They couldn’t wait till they were old enough to fight in a war, like Daddy, to have real-life enemies to vanquish.

  Maureen hired a part-time nanny to stay with the boys while she trekked off to Aberdeen, Oban, Peebles—wherever there were sheepdog trials to watch or farmers to meet. Within a year, she bought four bitches, three dogs, and half a dozen ewes. Paul hired a joiner to build the kennel on the lawn out back, behind it a shed for the sheep.

  The paper was thriving, so Paul, too, traveled a good deal. He gave lectures at universities, awards to authors, advice to younger editors. The hectic separations and reunions were often renewing for the family, romantic for Paul and Maureen. He was generous with the boys, patient with their wildness. He loved the rare evening together at home, a birch fire in the timber-striped parlor: Paul going over the ledgers, Maureen telling stories to the twins while she brushed out one of the dogs, Fenno assembling a model ship or spreading his arms and careening in circles, quietly strafing the carpet.

  Sunday mornings Paul rose early, before church, and took a long walk. Spread out behind them lay woods and fields, partitioned by mossy stone walls. In some of the fields sheep and cattle grazed, but most were vacant, tall with timothy waiting to be hayed.

  Along one wall, a dirt path led away from their lawn. Half a mile out it diverged, the left way leading to a farm, the right way to Conkers, the manor house adjoining the farm. Beyond the fork, other trails and tractor lanes crisscrossed the land, and often Paul saw the prints of horseshoes. In autumn and spring, the foxhunt came through. Some Saturdays, from the house, Paul heard the huntsman’s horn in the distance, its monotonous bittersweet warbling; in November, through the leafless trees, he’d glimpse splinters of red as the riders sped past in their vivid coats. If the hounds were on
a fresh line, giving tongue, Maureen’s collies would gather against the fence of their kennel and yowl with longing.

  The only trouble came from their neighbor. Mrs. Ramage spent a great deal of time maintaining a colorful, highly regimented garden, and as she worked, she would peer through the hedgerow. The Lurker, Maureen called her, amused at the outset. But not six months after they arrived, Mrs. Ramage voiced her dismay as to how they’d destroyed their flowerbeds. Maureen kept up the roses in front, the lupines by the kitchen, but to make room for the kennel she had flattened two plots of peonies, lilies, and hardy, deep-rooted lilacs. The rest of the beds had seeded over with mustard and loosestrife. When Mrs. Ramage pointed a garden glove at the lush purple flowers and told Maureen how their roots would slowly suck all moisture away from the rest of her lawn, killing off the flora one species after another, Maureen answered, “Actually, I’ve always thought them rather gorgeous,” and walked around the house, out of sight.

  Nor did Mrs. Ramage approve of the way they were raising their boys. Every so often, she would lean through a break in the hedgerow and ask if the children could please calm their racket. Her own children were grown and gone, so Paul chose to see her meddling as a kind of nostalgic envy. He indulged her with confessions that yes indeed, these lads were spoiled something fearful and there’d be hell to pay down the road if he and Mrs. McLeod didn’t crack the whip a bit more. It was Paul who apologized, herded the boys indoors and hushed them. Maureen could barely contain her rage. After enduring months of complaints, she refused any longer to acknowledge their neighbor with the slightest nod. Following Paul into the house, she would storm, “‘Seen and not heard, seen and not heard’! If I hear that fascist platitude cross her lips one more time, no one’ll see or hear a thing more from her!”

  But if Maureen went easy on the boys, she was strict with her dogs. The pups were whelped in the scullery off the kitchen and slept in the house, with their mother, for the first two months. Every day, Maureen took them outside for supervised play. She let the boys fool with them, chase them, roll them over, tickle their spotted pink bellies. But then the pups were sent away to nearby farms for another few months. When they returned, they lived in the kennel and training began. They became obedient yet willful, commanding yet stealthy. Their attention to Maureen, her voice, her hands, was unwavering and intense; Paul wondered sometimes if this was a standard against which his own attention might be secretly held—and found wanting.

  She never struck a dog, but her voice when she was displeased became deep and rough, a tone that Paul had never heard in any other context. “I’m a wolf. Ruthless. Unyielding,” she told him. “That’s what they learn.” From his library, upstairs, he could see her on the lawn, putting them through drills, often out there till twilight. Without seeing her face, he might hear her scold a disobedient dog. He would see the dog, even from that distance, looking at her in apparent fear, crouching low to the grass. She commanded this fear through words and gestures alone.

  One Sunday they were out on the lawn: Paul resting on a chaise, Maureen hosing down the pens, and the boys playing quietly for a change, each on his own. Betsey, Maureen’s favorite bitch, hunted insects among the wildflowers. David had a new toy, a red ball, which caught Betsey’s eye. He threw it to her and shouted rudely, “Fetch!” But Betsey carried it off, and when David followed and tried to take back his ball, she growled. In an instant, Maureen had lifted the dog off her feet by the loose skin on her chest. She shook Betsey so hard she yelped. “Do that again, anything like it, and I will have you shot.” Maureen spoke, literally, in a growl. This time, lying nearby, Paul saw her face up close. Her eyes were so wide she looked crazed. After she let the dog go, her hands shook. Betsey looked up at Maureen with the most bereaved expression Paul had ever seen in a dog. “That’s a promise,” Maureen told her, quietly but unrelenting.

  That was their second summer at Tealing. A year later, Paul took a call at his office from one of the county aldermen. Mrs. Ramage had filed a complaint. The alderman was delicate, apologetic, but there was no getting around it. The sheep smelled, Mrs. Ramage claimed, and the dogs barked up a row. The kennel, visible from her bedroom, was a “blemish upon the landscape.” Paul was glad she had not come directly to them. For all her insolence, Mrs. Ramage was afraid of Maureen, perhaps with some justification. Paul told the alderman that he would not challenge the complaint but asked for two months’ grace. He had a compromise in mind.

  He was thinking of the long meadow on the opposite side of their property, the one beyond the burn. It belonged to Colin Swift, the man who had recently bought Conkers and the adjoining farm. A sea of weeds, the field lay unused, since its back half tended to flood in the spring when the burn spilled over its banks.

  “SHE WAS TELLING ME,” says Fern, “about a production of Madame Butterfly—she saw it at the Met. Amazing set decoration, she was telling me, with a full-grown actual live tree onstage, light through the branches, purple kimonos with gold butterfly medallions, hung like ghosts on the walls of the house. The butterflies up there made her think of it. . . . I’ve never been to the opera. I used to think it was silly, I never thought I’d change my mind, but . . . you get older, you know? See things differently? Anna, though: Anna was born a woman of the world.” She smiles at her friend, who’s talking to Jack.

  Fern is prettier without the hat. Her wet hair is contained in a flat coil against her skull. She has a long studious face, a small chin. She tells Paul she’s a painter traveling on a fellowship. She finished university a year before and has been in Europe since then—mostly in Paris, where she rents a small flat. Anna, a college friend, is living on Paros all summer, working on a dig.

  At a nearby table sit Irene and Ray. They glance over now and then, their suspicions undisguised. Well fine, thinks Paul, let me take a nosedive from the widower’s pedestal. He has drunk too much retsina already; the heat in his skin and the ache in his legs from that torture rack of a saddle have given him a vicious thirst. And he drinks out of restlessness. In the grove, after small talk, introductions—what had possessed him?—he invited the girls to join their group for a drink before dinner. But dinner is not until nine, an hour away, and most of the others won’t show up till then. For now, the low sun seems to linger indefinitely, a party guest reluctant to leave.

  “Absurd the things people say. I mean, people think we don’t have a single tree in the entire city, for God’s sake, that you have to carry an Uzi to feel safe, that sadistic black boys roam the streets in search of white prey. Look, you could be raped and murdered in . . . well certainly London, but anywhere. Dangers lurk everywhere.” Anna is from Manhattan and seems to see the rest of the world as woefully benighted. She is defending the city’s virtues to Jack, who nods and smiles, unusually quiet. Aggressive and passionate by turns, the girls have talked for nearly an hour. Once, Jack turned briefly to Paul and cocked an eyebrow. Mockery; desire; conspiracy: it could have meant just about anything.

  “Yes, Anna, but you can’t tell me honestly you wouldn’t really rather live somewhere like . . .” Fern smiles at Paul. “Scotland. In the long run, I mean.”

  “Oh, no offense to Paul here, but never,” Anna says. “Too homogeneous.” She draws out the middle syllables, as if the word itself contains a genie. Paul has heard his son Fenno refer to this woman or that as a “drama queen,” and now he’s sure he knows exactly what it means. Fenno, like Anna, lives in Manhattan, but Paul decides against mentioning this. To do so would hand the conversation entirely to Anna—and place Fenno’s vital statistics under her dissecting eye. Paul’s oldest son, who has ventured the farthest from home, is the most independent and ought to worry Paul the least, but the distance in itself has always been a source of worry—as if, were something to go wrong, Fenno couldn’t be reeled in fast enough. And the twins, Paul can’t help feeling, will always have each other to lean on, collapse against, push each other upright if it comes to that.

  Fern sighs and turns her chair s
lightly aside, facing the sea. She closes her eyes and tilts her face upward, the same yearning, pious expression Paul saw in the grove after the butterflies—the moths. He continues to drink his retsina but tries to step outside its field of distortion. What could he want from her? She likes him, but she isn’t flirting. He watches Jack, the way Jack looks at Anna as she talks on and on.

  Fern says suddenly, “Pink sky at night, sailors delight.”

  Anna pauses, and Jack turns slowly toward Fern. “So then, must be a bloody lot of delighted sailors out there tonight, would you say?”

  “All right, all right,” says Fern, laughing self-consciously. “It’s something silly my mother recites whenever she sees a beautiful sunset. It just popped out.”

  “‘Just popped out!’” Jack warbles in falsetto, batting his eyes at the sun. “Ah, like a wanton champagne cork.” Fern continues to laugh, but Paul feels as if he is looking at Jack through the backside of a telescope. For that moment, he does not like the young man’s wit, its facile malice.

  At nine (promptly, since Marjorie’s in the lead), the rest of the group arrives, and there is a complicated move to a larger, more sheltered table.

  Anna takes Fern by the elbow. “Well, boys, we have crispier fish to fry.”

  “So . . . well,” says Fern. When she stands, she is clearly dizzy and leans for a moment on her friend. Paul murmurs a polite good-bye. For the third time in a day, he tries to memorize her features, sure it’s the last he will see of this awkward, inexplicably appealing girl.

  In the hotel bar after dinner, after the others have gone upstairs, Jack puts on an American drawl and impersonates the two girls. “‘Why these donkeys lead the life o’ Riley! Why, compared with the steeds of the New York mounted bobbies—no picnic that, keeping all those bumpkin tourists in line!’” He unfolds a napkin, drapes it on his head, and raises his voice an octave. “‘Oh but if the poor things lived in heavenly Scott-land . . .’” He drops the napkin and his voice. “‘Land of warm beer, boiled sheep guts, and men showing off their ugly knees, you mean!’”