Rosie Thomas - A Simple Life

The academic year turned with the seasons through fall and the long New England winter to spring, at last, and the heat of summer. The pattern and measure of university life as it revolved around Matthew was familiar to each member of the Steward family. Matthew appointed his team and began his ambitious research programme. Work took up much of his time, as it had done in England. The boys settled into their school, accepting or rejecting the various customs of this new place with their usual clarity. It was only Dinah, with no niche of her own beyond the house and the family, who still felt an outsider as the months passed. With an oblique view of herself that somehow did not take account of her good looks or good humour, she envisaged a tall, spare and awkwardly reserved Englishwoman who seemed to move through the unmapped thickets and coverts of Franklin in the wrong camouflage, anxious to blend in for everyone’s sake, but never quite managing to do so.

And then, twelve months after they had bought the house on Kendrick, at the same turning point of the year after the summer vacation but before the fall semester began, there was another party.

The Berkmanns were back from their year abroad, and the Pinkhams were having a barbecue evening to welcome them home. Dinah had offered to help Nancy make some desserts. In the morning she drove to the Stop’n’Shop and prowled the aisles, moving deliberately out of sync with the remorseless muzak that washed over her like nausea. From time to time a disembodied voice thanked her for shopping at Stop’n’Shop and begged her to check out the week’s supersaves. Dinah read the shelf-screamers and placards and found herself thinking of grocery campaigns she had worked on in the past. It seemed very long ago, and distant, and exotic. As she stood at the checkout she wondered if she wore the same drugged look as the other shoppers.

Back home the boys pitched balls outside in the yard while she made lemon tarts and meringues for Nancy.

The house was quiet except for the dog, Ape. Matthew and the boys had chosen a barrel-bodied creature with a rough coat and beady eyes. His toenails clicked on the pine boards as he roamed the house and occasionally his tail thumped meatily against a door. Dinah knew that he stared expectantly at her back as she worked.

‘No,’ she told him without looking round. ‘Go away.’

Her voice cracked the silence. The solitude was oppressive. She looked around; the kitchen was orderly with utensils stacked in the sink and the finished desserts were laid out waiting for the evening. Dinah longed for company, for the solace of talk, with a longing that dried her throat like thirst. But Nancy would be busy with her two little girls and Dee would also be occupied with children. All the children in the neighbourhood flocked to the Kerrigans’, even Jack and Merlin. Dinah knew plenty of other people in Franklin now, but there were none she could count on in just this moment of need.

It was three-thirty.

She could drive over and call in on Matt at the lab. She smiled at the thought of surprising him. It was a while since she had dropped in there. She heard his accounts of how the research was progressing, but she wasn’t quite sure of the latest developments.

The idea took hold. She could say hi to the team, most of whom she knew, and then perhaps Matt and she might even go for a coffee. Years ago, before the children, she sometimes used to look in on him at his lab in London. Through one of the portholes in the swing doors she would catch sight of the back of his head and his shoulders hunched over a rack of test-tubes or a set of DNA sequences. He would look up and see her and wave her over. Then they would walk downstairs to a canteen, and laugh and drink urn tea at a table decorated with chipped formica and a crinkled tin ashtray.

Outside, Dinah called across to the boys.

‘I’m going over to see Daddy for an hour. Don’t leave the street, will you?’

‘Yeah, Mom.’

They were old enough now. Jack was ten and Merlin nearly nine.

She drove her Jeep along Pleasant and turned across Main under the traffic lights, and from there swung into the central square. There was a wide green with handsome trees enclosed by solid, pinkish brick buildings. Franklin was proud of its history, and there were a number of tasteful shops on the green selling souvenirs and pamphlets about the original settlers and notable sons of the town. The campus of the University of Massachusetts at Franklin extended from the far side of the green, beyond a pair of tall stone pillars and a ponderous statue of the Founder. The buildings were dignified, with stone steps and massive doors and pediments with clocks that reflected the sun in discs of gold. There were libraries and chapels and memorial theatres facing each other across inevitable smooth lawns; this was the face of the university that was featured in prospectus photographs.

Matthew’s part of the foundation was housed in one of a series of big, glassy blocks discreetly separated from the photogenic old buildings by a belt of trees. These newer facilities were a world away from the mousy warren of stairs and ancient cubbyholes where he had worked in London, although Matthew seemed barely to notice the difference.

Defiantly she left the Cherokee in a convenient space labelled faculty members only, and strolled across the grass towards the science blocks. The steps and lawns and student parking lots were deserted and somnolent in the sun. It would be another week before the students came crowding back in time for Registration Day. The clock on the James Randall Hallett Library struck four behind her, triggering a series of associations. The church clock in the village, back at home. Vicarages and English tea. Gardens with roses and honeysuckle. Fields with gates, and white-laced hawthorn hedges.

Dinah walked faster, digging her hands deeper into the pockets of her skirt. Her hair was pulled into a thick plait that felt weighty and hot at the nape of her neck. No, not plait, braid. Bangs. She marshalled the different words, distracting herself by doing so.

The road curved through the shadow of the trees. There were huge, elegant conifers here with branches like trailing skirts that looked black in the bright light.

There was more grass in front of the new buildings, a curving bank of it, and across the grass a scatter of people. The senior members of the various faculties pursued their research throughout the year, so there were more parked cars here, and the doors of the dining commons were open.

Dinah headed diagonally across the lawns. In front of Matthew’s building a handful of people were playing frisbee. She watched a boy in a baggy white shirt leap up and twist in the air to make a catch. Several voices called out and then the disc floated on from his hand in a smooth arc. All the figures were leaping now, their hair and clothes rippling and Dinah imagined how a director might freeze the frame to capture a single image, a blurred smiling face in a swathe of hair and an outstretched hand to signify, what, youthful abandon, confidence, freedom?

For the life that you live.

Perfume, trainers – sneakers – or low-fat yoghurt?

She was smiling with pleasure at the sight of the frisbee players when she realised that one of them was Matthew.

He was wearing khakis and a blue shirt that had pulled loose, and a peaked baseball cap she had never seen before. It was jammed low over his forehead to keep the sun out of his eyes and his hand was reaching up in a salute as he called out.

‘Sean! Over here, look.’

Sean Rader had been part of Matthew’s old team in London. It was part of the agreement Matt had made that he should be able to bring two of his key people over to New England with him. Dinah had met Sean often, back in London. He was a small, tense man with a corrugated frown. And now he was out in the four o’clock sunshine playing frisbee and shouting. These were all people who worked with Matthew. The boy in the white shirt was a technician, and there was a little dark-haired woman PhD and Jon Liu, Matt’s deputy director, and half a dozen others.