Her (26 page)

My father rarely had time for this sort of thing. I sat in the passenger seat holding my canvas bag in my lap, aware of the lit cigarette moving from steering wheel to his mouth and back again. The novelty of this quiet intimacy as the car bowled through the marshland (with its crooked trees and singing lengths of wire; the wind feathering the grasses and dimpling the dark water in the ditches) felt good, promising, as if he might be taking an interest; as if I might finally be learning to feel at ease in his company.

There was a sort of disappointment as the wharves and spires of the town loomed up ahead. The narrow streets were crammed with day-trippers so he dropped me near the station and accelerated away in a burst, furious at the lack of parking spaces. I collected the packet of photographs from the chemist’s, and made my way up Mermaid Street to the teashop, as arranged. I’d just claimed a table in the window (the waitress hastily clearing away the sundae glass and teacups, swiping the table with a cloth) and was opening the packet, anticipating the usual disappointments of red-eye and over-exposure and movement blur, when I saw my father coming out of the tobacconist with a newspaper under his arm. Under the canopy – striped like an Everton mint – he paused to pull the foil from a fresh packet of cigarettes; and then he looked up and something caught his eye, and he stepped forward and said something, and he smiled.

It shot through me like horror: a cold dull shock, almost deadening. Entirely new, yet somehow not a surprise.
He never looks at me like that
, I thought. Perhaps at this point I was also thinking,
And he never looks at her like that, either.

Emma stood there in front of him, her back to me, shifting her weight from one foot to the other, pulling at her hair.
Preening
, I thought, but perhaps that was unfair. Perhaps it was only unease. They stood there beneath the striped canopy, talking for a moment or two; he offered her a cigarette; she refused, seemed to laugh, glanced at her wrist and then all of a sudden she was moving off, nodding, raising her hand, her palm flashing in farewell.

I saw him watching her.

When he found me at the table, he didn’t mention Emma at first, and then he couldn’t resist, he had to say her name; and it reminded me of my schoolfriend Della and her terrible, humiliating need to talk about Sam, Louise’s older brother (who thought we were all pretty awful and didn’t bother to hide the fact).

As the tea and cakes were set down in front of us, my father mentioned he’d just bumped into that friend of mine, the Pugh granddaughter, the girl who came for lunch – perhaps I’d seen her? Emma, that’s right. He’d asked her to join us, but she was late for her lift, her grandmother was waiting for her at the bottom of the hill. She and her sister were leaving tomorrow. He supposed I’d be staying in touch with her.

Perhaps
, I said.

You should make sure of it
, he said. Pretty girl. Clever too, he imagined. ‘Her whole life ahead of her,’ he said, dreamily; and I could tell then that her prospects were far better than my own. He seemed to expect something from me at this point; an anecdote, perhaps, or information, but I didn’t know anything about her, really. So we sat in silence as he drank his tea and looked out at the people passing in the street, and at his own dissatisfied expression in the glass. ‘You could take a leaf out of her book,’ he said eventually, almost absently.

While she was podding peas and waiting for
The Archers
, my mother remembered something. ‘Oh, Paul, I meant to say, someone from the studio rang for you.’ She couldn’t lay hands on the piece of paper, and she couldn’t remember the name, and suddenly I saw her through his eyes: the dress with the dirty hem, her face with its lines and pores, the mild chaos that always accompanied her, as clinging as yesterday’s woodsmoke. The room upstairs, all the ungainly equipment. I thought of the spinning wheel’s pedal noisily rising and falling, the stiff waxy handfuls of wool turning into stringy beaded yarn; the sound of the shuttle as another length of rough fabric emerged from the loom. The pointless stubborn activity of it all.

My father slipped away noncommittally. I wanted to hurt someone, and he was out of my reach. But I could hurt her. So I did. ‘We saw Mrs Pugh’s granddaughter again today,’ I said, as I laid the table for supper, catching my face in the flat blades of the knives. ‘In town. Doing some shopping.’

Emma. Such a nice girl.

I said yes, she seemed OK. I left a pause. I said, ‘I didn’t talk to her, actually. Dad did.’ I laughed. I said I’d happened to see them together, talking on the street, they hadn’t known I was watching. As I said it, I was thinking,
don’t over-egg it, don’t embroider, keep it simple. It’ll be more powerful if it’s simple.

I put down the salt cellar and the pepper grinder. I said, reluctantly, ‘I think he’s a bit knocked out by her, if you know what I mean.’

She kept moving between the Raeburn and the sink, the refrigerator and the kitchen table, her face always turned away from me. ‘Really?’ she said, quite coolly. ‘Do you think so? How funny.’

‘I don’t know, he seems kind of moony about her. He looked . . . idiotic, if you want the truth,’ I said with a sigh. And then, ‘Oh watch out, the peas are boiling over.’

It was a little thing, but it was enough to make her think. Enough to make her check his pocket diary, his wallet, the phone bill. Enough to ensure she found some evidence of something.

I was unjust to my mother, of course. I see that now. It wasn’t her fault, not really. But my father, in his own absurd way, has acknowledged his culpability (and paid for it, and continues to pay, even in ways that infuriate me, like sending his rich ignorant friends, with all their many bare walls, in my direction). Emma, on the other hand, has never shouldered any responsibility for what happened. None at all.

A moment of quiet. The hammock ropes creak against the trunk. A dog howls mournfully on the other side of the valley. ‘It’s strange,’ I say, over the rim of my glass, as if I’m talking to myself. ‘I don’t often think about it. Perhaps it’s because of Sophie being the age she is . . . perhaps that’s why.’

It all sounds so tidy, so fake. The edited highlights. I almost want to laugh.

‘And you?’ I say. ‘Tell me your story. Everyone has a story.’

‘Nothing to report,’ she says, a little shamed.

‘Nothing?’ I say. ‘I don’t believe you.’

‘It’s true,’ she says.

‘But your parents. I mean . . .’

‘Oh, don’t get me wrong, it was hard losing them in the way I did, but I can’t
reproach
them for anything. I’ve been so lucky, sometimes I think I must have it coming to me, somewhere down the line.’

We sit together, thinking of her parents. Andrew, Ginnie. My memories are now caught up in the photograph I saw in the Carmody Street sitting room: Andrew’s fox-coloured summer beard, Ginnie’s smocked top and the big round sunglasses pushed up to hold back her hair. The shadow of the photographer falling towards them, Lucy or Emma herself, a child then, in a nightgown and wellingtons perhaps, or a sundress patterned with poppies, straps knotted into bows over bony fledgling shoulders. I think of the child lifting the black plastic camera, squinting through the viewfinder, fixing them and telling them to say cheese. ‘Stilton,’ they say. ‘Double Gloucester.’ And then they smile, and time stops and holds them like that forever.

I say, ‘What do you mean?’

She says she always felt lucky, a bit too lucky somehow. She goes on to count her blessings, almost feverishly. She was so fortunate with her parents, her education. Meeting Ben after a string of no-hopers; managing to get pregnant, quite far into her thirties and then again close to her fortieth birthday. Everyone’s healthy, touch wood. Money’s pretty tight, but then that’s hardly unusual. Of course, she misses her career, but perhaps once the kids are both at school she’ll be able to resurrect it or retrain – maybe as a primary-school teacher – or set up her own business. ‘I’ve always felt it, I’ve always felt I’m due for a bit of a kicking,’ she’s saying, as if it sounds like nonsense.

And then Ben’s on the terrace, calling to her, saying he’s sorry to break up the party, but Christopher’s in a right old state, could she lend a hand? And she sighs and leans forward, sliding out of the hammock.

When I go inside fifteen minutes later, the door to the room Cecily shares with her parents is shut, and I assume she’s safely down, but Christopher is glimpsed from the corridor: kneeling up in bed, his face blotchy and desperate, as if no one is listening to him. ‘He’s all alone!’ he’s whimpering as his parents move around the bed, picking up towels and pairing sandals. ‘He’s all alone, no one to take care of him.’

‘Darling, he’ll be fine,’ says Emma. ‘I’m sure some lovely family has found him by now. They’ll look after him.’

To judge from the wails, this is more painful than the thought of Blue Bunny lost in the wood.

I shower and wash my hair, using Delphine’s almond shampoo. I’m wrapped in my towel, applying aftersun, when Sophie comes in without knocking, throwing herself down on the bed. ‘He’s never going to shut up,’ she says, pressing her palms into her eye sockets. ‘Oh my God, what a noise.’

‘I know, poor creature. You were like that, with Boy. Do you remember Boy? He was a girl, but you cut off his pigtails.’

She lies back on my pillows, yawning, flicking through the books on my bedside table while I get dressed. She’s not really watching me as I brush my hair and put on a little mascara, as I pick up the canvas shopper containing Blue Bunny and put it on the top shelf at the back of my cupboard.

Overhead, the fan blades go
wuh wuh wuh.

‘Have you got any nail-varnish remover?’ she asks.

‘I think so. Check the wash bag by the sink.’

She gets up and I can hear her unzipping it, rummaging around. Got it, she says. When she comes out with the bottle and cotton wool pads, she’s wearing Emma’s bracelet on her wrist. ‘This old thing again,’ she says. ‘I like the pineapple. So retro.’ She angles her wrist, inspecting the beads and trinkets. ‘What’s this one?’ she asks, fingering the blue glass.

I tell her it’s to ward off bad luck. And that’s all I say, at first. But just before we go through to join the rest of them I say, ‘Just pop that back where you found it, please,’ and she looks at me suddenly, a quick sharp glance, and asks, ‘Can’t I just wear it for supper? It’s a piece of junk, right? What’s it doing here, anyway?’

‘Someone gave it to me, a long time ago,’ I say, and she smiles dismissively, ‘Oh. I see. A
boy
friend.’

It’s a risk, and I’m afraid. But Emma’s too distracted at supper to notice my daughter’s tacky little bracelet. Christopher won’t settle, and keeps appearing at the table like a wraith, a small and tragic apparition. She and Ben are up and down all evening like jack-in-the-boxes.

All the time, while Sophie reaches for bread and pours herself more water, the trinkets and beads slide and spin and clink on the string looped around her wrist. It’s a tiny sound, a tiny spectacle that catches nobody’s interest. It’s a signal from the past; but no one can decipher it but me. I’m relieved about this, of course. Yet I’m also conscious of a sense of insult. It meant so very little to her. Nothing, perhaps. ‘Keep it,’ she’d said. ‘You can give it back when we meet up next time.’ And then, seeing my expression, ‘It’s not valuable, it’s just bits and bobs, silly old stuff. You don’t have to wear it if you don’t like it.’

I clear the table and boil the kettle for tisanes. ‘I could make some calls tomorrow, before you go,’ I say, as the kettle starts to keen. ‘I could ring the monastery, see if it has turned up.’

‘Would you?’ Emma says. ‘Not much hope, but . . .’

‘You never know,’ I say.

When I go in to say goodnight to Sophie, she’s already asleep: her lamp still on, white wires trailing from her ears. I ease out the earphones and put the iPod on the bedside table. The bracelet is still on her wrist, the blue glass of the evil eye darkening as I lean across and click off her light. She murmurs something and rolls over, the linen sighing.

I do not dream. The sound of the sprinklers wakes me briefly in the early hours: the soft pattering, like the beating of hundreds of wings.

In the morning I find Cecily goggling at cartoons while Emma sleeps on the sofa in an unflattering oversized T-shirt printed with poodles. I stand by the coffee table for a little while, watching her: the palm under her hot cheek, the wedding ring and the white mark left by the strap of her wristwatch, the fine gold bristles on her shins.

While the others eat breakfast I walk around the lawn holding my phone to my ear, doing a bit of gesticulating, in case anyone is watching; and when I come back into the house I report that there’s no sign of the rabbit at the monastery, but I’ve left my number in case it turns up. And I offer to go back to the little town where we bought the crêpes, ‘just in case someone’s found it and left it on a bench or something’, giving Ben and Emma time to pack up.

‘Oh no, you mustn’t,’ they say. ‘Are you sure . . .? God, that would be so incredibly kind.’

I don’t bother, of course. I drive a little way along the coast road and stop to buy melon and aftersun. As I come out of the pharmacy I drop the plastic bag containing Blue Bunny in a bin. Then I go to the main square and order a café au lait and watch the yappy little dogs being exercised. It’s fairly early, and there’s very little traffic, just the occasional scooter whining through the back streets. Women in housecoats are mopping front steps, or throwing open the upper windows and draping bed linen over the sills. I get out my sketchbook and do a quick drawing of two old men smoking and reading newspapers on a bench.

Soon the Nashes will be putting their cases into the car, and then they’ll drive away, and Thérèse’s husband will drop her off at the end of the drive. She’ll change the sheets and sweep the floors and scour the basins, and quiet order will be restored to all the rooms, as we wait for Charles to arrive.

‘I don’t get it,’ Ben whispers as we lie beneath pearl-coloured sheets, lamps angled low, mindful of Cecily’s cot in the corner. ‘It’s weird, isn’t it?’