Larry’s Party. Carol Shields

“Or screw at all.”

      “Probably.” He smiled down at her.

      “Notice I said screw and not fuck.”

      “Congratulations.”

      “I’m a married woman now. Respectable.”

      “Ha.” Still smiling.

      “Ha yourself.”

      A white-haired husband and wife from Arizona had signed on to the tour. They were in England on their sabbatical leave. She, the wife, pronounced the word “sabbatical” as though the syllables were beads on a string. She explained to Dorrie, who had never heard of a sabbatical, that she and Dr. Edwards, her husband, had been to Thailand “last time” and before that to Berkeley in California. “We see these occasions as opportunities to replenish ourselves every seven years,” she said, “and take stock.”

      The members of the tour group were wakened early each morning in their various freezing hotel rooms by a knock on the door, then Arthur calling out an upbeat “Morning!”

      “Oh, God!” Dorrie came up from under the blankets.

      Larry, shaving, washing, attempted to avoid his father’s eyes in the mirror, that ghostly presence floating beneath the steamed-over surface. He tried, through the lather, to blink the face away, and by the time he was fully dressed, two sweaters plus a jacket, he had mostly succeeded.

      Invariably he and Dorrie were the last ones down to the hotel dining room, and every morning they were greeted by the same teasing cries of welcome. “Here come the honeymooners.” “Late again.” “Hail to the bride and groom!” Dorrie, ducking her head, her mouth puckering up with happiness and embarrassment, slid into a chair, while Larry accepted pats on the back or thumbs-up signs from the men.

      There were hot plates of bacon and sausages and egg – although Dorrie, who was feeling “off,” made do with tea and toast. After that the tour members took their places on the coach and set off for the day’s destination. The New Zealanders and Australians – Heather and Gregory, Joan and Douglas, Marjorie and Brian, Larry never did get all their names straight – preferred to sit near the front of the bus where they bantered genially back and forth, observing silence only when Arthur drew their attention to points of interest. The Romanians sat at the back, the same seat every day. Larry and Dorrie found themselves in the middle of the coach – Dorrie next to the window, taking it as her rightful place since she was shorter than Larry, and because the window seat made her feel less queasy.

      Dr. and Mrs. Edwards sat across the aisle from them, their maps and guidebooks spread out on their laps. “We don’t want to miss a thing,” Mrs. Edwards told them. She had her suspicions about Arthur. He was lazy, she said. He “recited” instead of “interpreting.” And he left items off the itinerary, a certain twelfth-century abbey that was definitely starred in their guidebook. She planned to write to Sunbrite’s head office about it when she got home.

      “Now, now, Sweetheart,” Dr. Edwards said, patting her hand.

      Dr. Edwards told Larry to call him Robin. He asked Larry what he did professionally, what his “field of endeavor” was. Larry told him about the Flowerfolks chain of florists back in Winnipeg, about how he’d got started in the business by taking a floral arts course at a local college. “Ah, botany!” Dr. Edwards said. “Or would that be horticulture?” He turned his body stiffly toward Larry, awaiting his reply. “A little of each,” Larry said, thinking. “But not quite.”

      Dr. Edwards was a sociologist; population, urban patterns. A perfect dunce in the garden, he told Larry. Didn’t know a primrose from a lily. He’d never developed an interest. He hadn’t had the leisure. He and Mrs. Edwards lived in an apartment in Tucson, always had, so there wasn’t the need. But someday, when he retired, he might look into it. A hobby kind of thing. A person had to keep learning.

      “Maybe I should take up sociology as a hobby,” Larry said. He meant it as a joke, but Dr. Edwards drew back, startled.

      One afternoon the coach came to a halt beside a rutted field, the site of an old Roman town, its houses and temples and public spaces outlined on the grass with flat red bricks. Dorrie sat down on a corner of a house foundation and wrote in her diary: “Second Century.” She underlined the entry twice, and looked up at Larry, blankly. He could see it was hard for her to believe that this ruined site had once been a real town bursting with men and women.

      She was cold, she told Larry. She’d had enough for one day. More than enough. Later Larry thought of that moment of exhaustion, Dorrie huddled on the foundations of an ancient Roman dwelling, how it seemed to split their honeymoon in two.

      They were ushered as the days went by through castles, churches, through stately homes and crumbling tithe barns, and they tramped one morning, in a soft gray rain, along the top of the medieval walls of the city of York. That day, in a vast museum, they looked at coins and furniture and agricultural implements and, spread out in an immense glass case, more than fifty different kinds of scissors for trimming the wicks of lamps. History, it seemed to Larry, left strange details behind, mostly meaningless: odd and foolish gadgets, tools that had become separated from their purpose, whimsical notions, curious turnings, a surprising number of dead ends.

      But it was outdoor England that took Larry by surprise and filled him with a kind of anxiety as the coach traveled further and further north. This anxiety he identified, finally, as a welling up of happiness. The greenness of England. It seemed there was not one part of this island that was not under cultivation, not one piece of land so exposed or unfavorable that something could not be made to take root and grow. Their guide, Arthur, joked that in the city of Leeds the birds wake up coughing, but even there, between the factories and dark smudged houses, Larry glimpsed the winter trunks of oaks and chestnuts. Leafless now, thrust up against smoking chimneys and blackened air, these trees seemed to Larry magisterial presences, rich in dignity and entitlement. He thought, mournfully, of the spindly, skinny poplars back home, the impoverished jack pines and stunted spruce, their slow annual growth in a difficult climate and their lopsided, unlovely shapes.

      But it was the hedges of England, even more than the trees, that brought him a sense of wonderment. Such shady density, like an artist’s soft pencil, working its way across the English terrain. Why hadn’t his parents told him about this astonishing thing they’d grown up with? The hedges were everywhere. Out in the countryside they separated fields from pasture land, snaking up and down the tilted landscape, criss-crossing each other or angling wildly out of sight, dividing one patch of green from another, providing a barrier between cattle and sheep and flocks of geese. These hedges were stock-proof, Arthur explained, meaning sheep couldn’t slip through – they were every bit as effective as stone walls or barbed wire, and some of them had roots that were hundreds of years old.

      In the towns the clipped hedges served as fences between houses, a stitching of fine green seams, and gave protection and privacy to tiny garden plots. Luxurious and shapely, they seemed pieces of tended sculpture, and now, late in a mild winter, their woody fullness was enveloped by a pale furred cloud of green. Buds in March. It seemed impossible. Young leaves unfolding.

      Back home you hardly ever saw a hedge, or if you did it was only common spirea or the weedy, fernlike caragana, which was almost impossible to keep in trim. Larry’s father had surrounded the Ella Street house with a chainlink fence, top quality – that was years ago. Like the aluminum siding he’d put on top of the house’s old clapboard, it did the job and there was zero upkeep.

      “What are all these hedges made of?” Larry asked Arthur, tossing back the hair he didn’t have anymore. “I mean, what kind of plants do they use?”

      Arthur didn’t know. He knew history stuff, he knew his kings and queens, but he was a Londoner. He didn’t know green stuff.

      In a brilliantly lit bookstore in Manchester Larry found a book about hedges. It was in a bargain bin. Over a hundred colored, badly bound illustrations instructed the reader on the varieties and uses of hornbeam, butcher’s broom, laurel, cypress, juniper, lime, whitethorn, privet, holly, hawthorn, yew, dwarf box, and sycamore. How