The View from Here Read Free Page A

thought, surprisingly for the first time, that Phillip might have confided in Tom about Josee. If he had, would Tom have told Alice? The idea appalled me. The humiliation. Strange, isn’t it, the sense of shame that someone else’s misdeeds can engender?
    But now here was Phillip suggesting that he should give that up, the weekly trip to London, to the office. To his lover. He would be with me all the time, and even if I’d miss the small freedoms that I had come to enjoy in his absences—the mistimed meals, the unstructured days, the long evening conversations with friends—I took this suggestion as a sign that I might have misread the airport telephone call, that the well of warm feeling that had been refilled during the past few days had not been poisoned after all.
    â€œI’d like that,” I said as the waiter reappeared at the door. He had forgotten our water.
    The next morning we met Chloe at the station. It was Friday, and she had taken the day off work so as to spend a long weekend with us. It was her third trip home since my news, which is what people called it— I was so sorry to hear your news— and she had spoken to me every day. She greeted us on the busy concourse with a young person’s shout and flagrant affection. Chloe is twenty-five years old and very pretty. She looks just like her mother.
    â€œLet’s see,” I said, peering at her feet.
    She twisted a slim leg toward me to show off a new kneelength black boot and said, “Maggie gave them to me,” a little shyly, as if this gift were illicit rather than something naturally passed between blood-tied people, between a woman and her daughter.
    She still feels, I think, a need to protect me, not from Maggie in particular, but from her relationship with her. She wants to stress that I am “mother.” It is what she introduces me as. She calls me “Ma” these days, while reserving an unadorned “Maggie” for the woman who gave birth to her. I need her reassurance much less than she thinks, but I appreciate her efforts anyway. And, it’s true, I was once much thinner-skinned on the subject. The day when Chloe was ten, when Maggie made contact again for the first time, the first time since she had disappeared just after Chloe’s first birthday, is still vivid for me.
    Looking at Chloe then, especially tall in her new boots, I thought about all the anxiety that call of Maggie’s had engendered, and the much-negotiated, much-monitored eventual reunion. It had all come to this, all that turmoil, mellowed to so much casual conversation on a railway platform.
    â€œHow is she?” I asked
    â€œOh, she’s fine. She sent a book for you.”
    It would be a book about healing, about the cyclical nature of things and the danger of burying emotions, a book about the mind’s effect on illness. I didn’t need a book to learn about things like that.
    I smiled and looped my arm through Chloe’s, and at the announcement of our train, we walked together, trailing Phillip, luggage-laden again, down the platform to our carriage. Chloe’s overnight bag was threatening to topple from its perch on top of our two larger, matching suitcases, and Phillip had to stretch his hand awkwardly to prevent the fall. He jerked his head to indicate where our seats were, and Chloe and I sat and compared magazines while he attended to the unloading. What a happy family we must have looked. A seamless happy family.
    The weekend was like so many weekends before it. We fell quickly into the easy patterns of our history together, even in the shadows of those thunderclouds, even with my fresh hospital admission looming. Chloe lay about and looked lovely and leaned on things and picked at food and tossed her hair and talked. About her friends, about her job, about her boyfriend, Ed, about the decorating she was planning for her flat. Phillip and I, from old habit, caught conspiratorial eyes