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The View from Here - Hardcover

McKinlay, Deborah

 
9781569478714: The View from Here
Hardcover
ISBN 10: 1569478716 ISBN 13: 9781569478714
Verlag: Soho Press Inc, 2011

Inhaltsangabe

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.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

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.

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

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,”...

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Verlag
Soho Press Inc
Erscheinungsdatum
2011
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
1569478716
ISBN 13 
9781569478714
Einband
Gebundene Ausgabe
Anzahl der Seiten
264
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