Her (28 page)

Cecily is tired, rubbing her eyes with her fists, so I take her into our room and lower her into her cot, tucking a thin sheet around her and then moving off to the window, to draw the curtains. It’s getting dark, the air full of stars and the surging tidal percussion of crickets. Gently I close the door, and then I say I’ll go and have another look around the garden, just in case. Ben is trying to interest Christopher in the story, but it’s not going very well.

In the kitchen I take the chicken out of the oven, and then I stand by the open fridge, staring at the cartons of milk and the paper parcels of cheese and pâté, waiting for the adrenalin to subside, just a little.
It’ll be OK. He’ll go to sleep eventually. Just one of those things.
I uncork the bottle of white wine and pour myself a glass. I drink most of it quite quickly. Then I top it up, and fill another one for Nina.

Out into the garden. The vast soft sky is almost entirely dark. The scents of herbs and flowers rise up like steam. I raise my arm to shield my eyes from the spotlights’ glare and look down, at my sandalled feet moving over the tiny glinting stones, between the lines of the hedges and the trickling rills of water.

I step onto the grass. In the hammock, Nina straightens up, beckons to me. I pass her a glass.
Hey, thanks.
Her face is in shadow. I tell her about the rabbit, ask if she remembers seeing it.

Nina thinks. ‘He took it out in the car this morning, didn’t he? Did he have it when we stopped for lunch? In the market?’

I say we fear he may have dropped it when he was looking at the toy stall. Then we hear Christopher’s wail issuing from the house, a sound of the purest, deepest despair.

‘Poor little chap,’ Nina says. I’m on the point of giving up and going indoors, but the noise stops. She adjusts her position, scooting sideways and twisting, swinging her bare legs free, issuing an invitation. ‘He’ll be OK,’ she says. ‘It’ll turn up. Hop in.’

There’s a moment when I simply have to trust the bloody thing won’t come crashing down, when I just have to let go. I lift my feet and my weight pushes me sideways into her. It’s embarrassing, somehow, the friendly physical collision. Her neat taut heat. I laugh too loudly and take a mouthful of wine. It almost goes down the wrong way. I cough.

‘You’ll be glad to see the back of us,’ I say, once we’re settled into a rhythm. I look up. A sliver of moon, thin and dissolving, like ice in water. I think I can identify the Plough, endlessly toiling through the sky, but I’m not a hundred per cent. Something bright flashes past at the edge of my vision: it’s unlikely to be a shooting star, I think. More likely to be a satellite.

Nina says,
not at all
. She feels bad that he spooked himself earlier, during their game. She should have realised that was going to happen.

I say that everything spooks him at the moment. It goes with the territory. The highs, the lows.

Light slides and darts in her glass as Nina says, ‘I remember what it’s like. That stage . . . fantastic, of course, but it’s such hard work. God, I remember Sophie . . .’

And now, because the wine has started to sing, because it’s our last night, because I’ve always wanted to, I ask what happened with Sophie’s father.

She sighs, but it’s not a reproachful sound, just a sad and contemplative one. She doesn’t mind telling me about this, I can tell, and the relief is delicious, intoxicating, as good as the secret itself. So she tells me how she met Arnold during her foundation year at art school, and then she describes the things he seemed to represent: a new way of defining herself, a chance to pull away from her parents and make her own mark. Having Sophie so young: that helped too. She found her purpose – as a painter, as a mother – through Arnold and Sophie. ‘My dad . . .’ she says. ‘Oh, he’s a charming man, too charming, probably. My mother was a casualty of all that. She never really got over it. Arnold showed me a way out.’

I let her talk, willing her on. My toe touches the ground from time to time, just keeping the rhythm.

It’s a melancholy story, as melancholy as I’d imagined. Her parents, ill-matched, drifted apart. The clincher came when her father, usually discreet, lost his head over a girl. ‘Someone I knew. That was enough.’

God.
I wince. ‘No. Seriously? He went off with a friend of yours?’

‘Oh, no. It wasn’t like that. Nothing
happened
. No one did anything. No one said anything. It was just the last straw.’ A light comes on in the house and she turns her face towards it. In any case, she adds, this girl wasn’t exactly a friend. They barely knew each other.

Her voice is low, almost dreamy, as if she has forgotten I am here. I get the feeling she doesn’t often discuss this. It must be good for her, I think. To speak about it.

‘My father . . . well, he was very taken with her. He made a bit of a fool of himself. I don’t think she was even aware of the effect she’d had on him. She was that sort of girl.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘You know. Beautiful . . . a bit careless.’

We think about these girls, how dangerous they can be.

Nina was Sophie’s age when it happened. For Nina’s mother, it was the final insult.

I make a stupid little sound of sympathy, and it breaks the spell. She shrugs and smiles in the dark, the shadows shifting over her face, and says, ‘Well, it was a long time ago.’

I feel her sigh come and go. The hammock ropes creak against the trunk. A dog howls on the other side of the valley. ‘It’s strange,’ she murmurs. ‘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 sad, so messy. Everything swims suddenly: the spotlights in the bushes, the stars, the dissolving moon.

‘And you?’ she says. She asks me to tell my story. Everyone has a story, she says.

I’m not so sure. I blink away the tears, grateful for the dark; conscious that after her story mine looks very dull, as good fortune sometimes appears. I tell her a little about my parents, whom I cannot reproach for anything, not even their dying. I whisper my confession. ‘I’ve been so lucky, sometimes I think I must have it coming to me, somewhere down the line.’

We sit there, our shoulders and elbows and hips pressed close, cradled by the gentle motion of the hammock.

Nina says, ‘What do you mean?’

I say I’ve always felt lucky, a bit too lucky perhaps; and I rush on, listing all the other things in my favour, the stars that happened to be in alignment: my education, my career; finding Ben just when I was on the point of giving up. The babies. (The babies, who drive me mad and run me ragged, who wear me out and show me up. The babies, who make it all wonderful. I can’t put that into words, so I don’t try.) As I list the advantages I’ve enjoyed, I’m thinking of the fairies crowding round Aurora’s cot, all but one.
I mustn’t forget any of the fairies.
Everyone’s healthy, touch wood. OK, there’s not very much money, but there’s enough, we’ll squeak by. I miss my career, but I’ve begun to think about how life will change once Cecily starts school. I have some plans.

‘I’ve always felt it, I’ve always felt I’m due for a bit of a kicking,’ I say, with a little gasp of embarrassment, because it does sound ridiculous, and I’ve never articulated it before.

But now Ben’s on the terrace, calling to me, saying he’s sorry to break up the party, but Christopher’s in a right old state, and could I lend a hand? I put my foot on the grass, and the rocking stops.

Christopher’s hot and panicky, so I take him into the bathroom and sit on the edge of the bath and hold him on my lap, pressing a damp flannel over his cheeks and his eyes, to cool him down, and then I wipe the flannel over his neck and his hands, and I stroke his hair and kiss him and tell him it’ll be OK, we’re doing what we can, and would he like something of mine to sleep with, just for tonight? His lip trembles, but he’s very brave, he chooses the T-shirt with the stars on it, so I tiptoe into our room and find it and bring it back to him. I think I’ve got him settled, but every time we try to leave, he flings back the covers and clings to us, and the tears start again.

He appears at regular intervals, barefoot and desolate, while we eat. And every time he materialises, I see Ben’s expression, and I know what he’s thinking.

It’s not much of a last supper.

While we’re clearing the table, Nina offers to make some calls first thing tomorrow, just in case Blue Bunny has turned up at the monastery.

‘Would you?’ I say. ‘Not much hope, but . . .’

‘You never know,’ Nina says.

When we say goodnight, we find Christopher has crept in and put himself to sleep in our bed and because we can’t face the repercussions of waking him Ben says he’ll swap places.

My boy is as restless in sleep as he is awake: twisting, turning, chattering for a moment or two, breaking into slow delighted giggles, catching his breath in terror. Every so often I’ll feel his knees pressing into my back, or he’ll fling out an arm so his fingers catch in my hair. Radiating heat and energy even in his dreams.

Cecily’s teeth wake us both at six. I’m anxious to let Christopher sleep as late as possible, so instead of waiting to see if she’ll resettle herself, I grab her out of the cot and hurry her from the room.

Once I’ve given her some Calpol and a bit of milk, I shove in a cartoon DVD, one of the half-sister’s, and Cecily sits on the rug staring at the screen while I lie down on one of the white sofas. My gaze drifts over Nina’s oil painting while I compose my mental lists, fretting about all the packing we have to do this morning, the things I’ll need to put aside for the flight.

And then I start thinking about how it’ll feel, returning to Carmody Street: the pot of wilted basil on the kitchen table, the laundry airer balanced in the bath, the brown stain spreading over the corner of Christopher’s ceiling. The grey skies. The Callaghans’ arguments coming through the wall.

Ben wakes me with a cup of coffee. Nina’s up, wandering around barefoot on the lawn, making calls as promised. Her gesticulations seem every bit as properly French as her accent. She’s wearing a sleeveless black dress, and I can see the small flat muscles moving in her bicep as she raises her left hand and opens it, spreading her fingers, as if she’s catching something, or letting it go.

She walks across the grass and up the steps.
Nothing at the monastery
, she reports, keeping her voice low so Christopher doesn’t hear. She offers to drive back to the town where we had lunch, just in case someone picked it up and left it on a bench in the square. If she sets off now, she’ll be home in plenty of time before we have to leave. ‘You’ve got your packing to worry about,’ she says, very firmly. She fetches her bag and collects her car keys from the wooden bowl on the counter.

By the time she returns, we’ve had our final swim and our luggage is ready. The sun sails high overhead, a pale ball in a white sky, shrinking the shadows and speed-drying the slate-coloured towels draped over the chairs on the terrace. Christopher is sitting on the shaded steps with Sophie, a toy ambulance in one hand, a piece of bread spread with runny brie in the other, leaning against her as she reads him a Richard Scarry book. He hasn’t mentioned Blue Bunny for an hour or so, and misses the little gesture (
No, nothing
) that Nina makes as she comes through the garden.

Maybe when we get back to London he’ll be so glad to see all his other toys that the rabbit will be forgotten, turning into something he’ll only vaguely remember when we scroll through the photographs of this holiday on the MacBook.

Nina passes me: a small shrug of apology and commiseration, that peculiar spicy fragrance. I stand behind Christopher and Sophie thinking,
oh well
, finishing my sandwich and looking out over the garden, trying to fix this moment in my mind: the smell, the temperature, the view of the sea. For a moment I think of the small window on the half-landing at Carmody Street, the not-quite-a-view glimpsed countless times a day as I descend and climb the stairs with my armfuls of clean and dirty laundry. The overgrown hedge, the long snaking shoots of bindweed, the galloping bamboo. The shed door that’s still hanging off its hinges. Maybe when the man comes to look at Christopher’s ceiling, I could ask him to fix the shed door, too.

‘The house was painted inside and outside,’ reads Sophie. ‘A truck brought furniture, a television set, a radio, rugs, pictures, a stove and lots of other things. The house was ready for the new family.’ She turns the page. A blue glass bead twists and spins on the string knotted around her wrist. An evil eye. Someone once told me they’re not actually evil at all; they’re amulets, worn to ward off bad luck or injury. The name’s a bit misleading.

‘That’s pretty,’ I say. She looks up at me. I nod at it.

‘Some weird old thing of my mother’s,’ she says. At the corner of my vision, I see Nina darting through the garden, a small shadow moving between the tidy lines of light and dark green.

Ben is sitting on our bed, sorting through the plane tickets and checking the passports while Cecily pulls herself to her feet, using the bars of the cot for stability. Once she’s up, quaking a little, her expression – smug, ecstatic – makes us laugh. ‘Yes, you
are
clever,’ I say, and Ben reaches over and takes my hand, and says, ‘Oh well . . .’ and I know when we get into bed tonight he will say
East, west, home’s best
, because one of us always says that when we’ve been away, it’s our ritual, and usually we mean it, too. One of the little things that makes us us.

I press my damp swimming costume into my case and zip it up and roll it through the house. Sophie and Christopher are in the hammock now, I can hear her talking to him, laughing. I can’t help feeling slightly irritated that she waited until the final minutes of our holiday to take an interest in him; but I know that’s unfair. I was much the same at seventeen, I suppose. Easily bored. Always eager for the next thing.

I drag the case down through the garden and leave it in the shade by the car, and then I carry the children’s bag down, too. When I come back up through the tiers of herbs, the low walls of lavender, I hear Sophie giggling, the sound of it over the trickling water, and then she says, quite loudly, as if in outrage, ‘The fuck she did!’ and I can see she’s on her phone, and Christopher isn’t with her in the hammock after all. Perhaps he never was.