by Eve Chase
“So I said to Elliot, ‘Darling, don’t despair. She may yet change her mind,’” she says companionably, stirring our drinks with a glass cocktail stick. I take the glass obediently, even though it’s far too early in the day for me. It’s the most exquisite cut-crystal goblet I’ve ever seen, like it’s been chipped from stars. I take a tiny polite sip and splutter: it’s one of the strongest gin and tonics I’ve ever tasted.
I smile at her brightly. “Ain’t happening. She’s not changing her mind, Helen. Believe me, I know Annie.”
“Well, she and Elliot will never make it work as a couple. Sadly,” she says as an afterthought, not sounding sad at all. She clinks down her glass on a mirrored side table. “Elliot can’t be tied down at his age. Nor can Annie. They’ve both got their lives ahead of them.” She touches my arm. The unexpected contact is like a small electric shock: she’s got such an untouchy-feely aura, a social awkwardness at odds with her privilege. “We have to face the facts, Sylvie.”
“I’m not about to pick my mother-of-the-bride outfit just yet,” I concede wryly. She fights a smile, the sort that reaches her eyes, which makes me wonder if there’s a warmer, more idiosyncratic Helen beneath the cold, polished surface.
I smile back, heartened. There are worse things than being a teenage single mother, I keep telling myself when the reality of Annie’s situation makes me bolt upright in bed, as it did this morning, frazzled with panic. There are women who can’t conceive or who miscarry, as I did, who spend thousands on unsuccessful fertility treatment and would give their right arm to have a new life budding inside them, however off the timing.
“Well, given that worst-case scenario, we’ll just have to crack on and find a good doula—Chelsea is awash with them—and a nutritionist . . .”
There’s something almost endearing about Helen’s earnestness. “I’ll make sure she doesn’t live off Kettle Chips and blue cheese, don’t worry, Helen.”
Helen frowns. “Right. Well, I’ll take control of the baby’s finances, then.”
I laugh, disbelieving of her bluntness. But of course she can’t help herself. The woman is a control freak. I wonder why I haven’t realized this before. I also feel jealous. I’d love to throw my financial largess around, not be the grandmother who’s picked apart the family nest at the worst time imaginable. “You are, of course, welcome to contribute, Helen, but I will make sure that the baby has everything it needs.”
She looks doubtful, opens her mouth to say something but thinks better of it. She glances at my full drink. “Would you prefer a coffee?”
“If it’s no bother. Sorry, not very good on spirits during the day.”
“Follow me,” she says, turning on her heel, a bit put out.
Excited to see more of the house, I follow Helen’s twiggy frame along a narrow hallway, decorated with arty black-and-white photographs. I pause to admire them and puzzle over what they might be. “Palm houses?”
“Kew! At night!” She’s unable to hide a passion that suggests I may have stereotyped her—the wealthy walking facelift—rather too quickly. And something changes between us, ever so slightly, a recalibration of who we both might be.
When we emerge into the kitchen conservatory at the back of the house, the south-facing light is blinding. It takes a moment for my eyes to adjust. I blink. Blink again. And then I see them. Rows of terrariums on a stone plinth, all different shapes and sizes. Dozens of plants held captive, trapped inside glass.
37
Rita
Walnut?” Robbie cracks his fist, shakes away the shell, and presses the brain-like nut into Rita’s hand. His gaze locked to hers, he closes her fingers slowly, one by one, each tugging some internal string inside Rita’s body until she feels tuned to him, like an instrument. “More where that came from.” He nods at the majestic tree hanging over his garden. The firelight streams in his eyes. “You won’t starve with me, Miss Rita.”
Rita bites into the walnut, her eyes half closed. Has she ever tasted anything more delicious? Nothing like the stale, bitter nuts she and Nan ate every Christmas, nervously, due to the fragility of Nan’s dentures. This is a different experience altogether. Eating a walnut in the woods! With a fat gold harvest moon hanging above the trees and a dog at her feet! She’s fallen into a Laura Ingalls Wilder novel, like the ones she read in the local library as a child.
Robbie’s small stone cottage, embraced on all sides by woodland, a fair walk from the road, once belonged to his late parents, “and before that, my grandparents,” he told her with simple pride. Inside it’s scruffy but ordered, glossy with age and patina. She could have spent hours poking curiously around in his workshop, a barnlike building that extends into the garden, a treasure trove of planes, lathes, band saws, and grinders, meaty lumps of ash and elm waiting to be turned into something else, given new life. But it’s one of those perfect summer nights, and the only place to be is in the garden, where they sit on a log next to a spitting fire under an indigo sky, pinholed with stars. The air is so still that the candles, stuck in empty wine bottles, don’t blow out. Rita’s full of the ham, smoky from being cooked over the fire, tender enough to feather on her fork. And she sloshes with beer when she laughs. Which is often.
“Are you warm enough?” Robbie breaks the forest hush, which feels simultaneously intensely private, a silence that only they can inhabit, and excited and alive, like it’s crackling. “Here. A blanket.”
“Thanks.” Her body absorbs the brush of his fingertips against the back of her neck, the lanolin smell of the wool. She finishes her beer—she’s so pleased he has nothing but beer, not something sweet and fizzy in a silly bottle, as if he knew what she liked—and sneaks a glance at Robbie’s mouth, the cactus stubble on his upper lip. She wishes she could capture just this, exactly as it is, and trap it under glass.
“Let me.” Robbie opens a new bottle of beer, chilled from the plastic bucket of ice, and passes it to her, leaning so that she can feel the muscular ridge of his body. His leg meets hers and stays there. Distance closed. She smiles. The dog looks up at them, glancing from one to the other, like a weary chaperone.
“I mustn’t return to duty drunk.”
“Don’t see why not. We’ll walk back. That’ll sober you up.”
“Good idea,” she says weakly, not wanting to sober up. Wanting, in fact, to get gloriously plastered and never leave.
The surrounding forest feels like it’s been grown just for them, the trees sculpted like bonsai, teased into shape to let in just the perfect amount of light—dreamy, underwatery—and the densest shadows against which the flames can flicker and lick.
She strokes the dog’s hard silky head because her hand suddenly needs to touch something. When she looks up at Robbie, his eyes are fixed on her. She smiles. She peels off her pink cardigan, midday hot all of a sudden, and wonders if there’s been some hiccup in the universe. How come she hasn’t realized Robbie was this attractive before tonight? When she had a chance. When he actually wanted to kiss her. Now she’s a mess of feelings that have nowhere to go. A weight is pressing down on her pelvis.
“So, Rita?” he teases.
“So?” She leans closer, stretching out one leg from under the folds of her skirt, not minding its length for once. Is she flirting? Is this what flirting feels like? She likes it.
The evening has been studded with these taut moments, before loosening again and turning into something else. Sparks from the fire flutter up in the wind and blow about. The dog closes his watchful eye and falls asleep.
“We never did dance that time.” He has a smile in his voice. The hint of something else too, and it lodges inside her body, sweetly.
“I’m too tall to dance,” she says, even though she couldn’t care less how tall she is tonight, and neither, it seems, can he. He pulls her up by the hand, easily, as if she were a wisp of a thing.
“You are magnificent, Rita.”
She throws back her head and laughs, so her cowlick bounces free of the hair grip.
When he kicks off his shoes Rita hesitates, then decides she doesn’t hate her feet anymore and follows his example. The ground is soft underfoot. She wants to lift his shirt and sniff his skin. The trees move and sway around them as they dance. The dog slopes away when they roll to the ground, the grass and bracken in their hair, their clothes peeling off, all breath and bodies, until she’s there, stark naked in front of a man for the first time in her life, stripped of everything she’s spent her entire life trying to hide, exposed, horrified, flying with joy.
But then he sees them. His expression instantly sobers. He traces the zipper-like scar across her stomach with a fingertip. She can’t speak. She’ll die of embarrassment and desire. The scars are a turnoff. Fred couldn’t even look at them.
“What happened to you?” he asks.
Because there’s nowhere to hide now, she tells him. Not just the actual accident: the flash of red deer leaping out; the car swerving and hitting the tree; her own escape, the first to be pulled out of the fireball—and the last. But what happened afterward. How she was in hospital for six months and spent most of the time looking at the strip-lit ceiling, metal-pinned legs cantilevered up, reversing events, making time go backward, the smashed car and the broken bodies fling back together. The flames extinguish. Returning the three of them to the safety of the campfire, the hands on her father’s wristwatch stuck forever at five past one.
“I’m so sorry, Rita.” Robbie presses his forehead against hers, as if to pour the pain from her head into his.
“There’s something else. Something very few people know. My . . . my secret.” Since she’s nothing to lose anymore, she tells him about the day a doctor stood next to her bed and said to her nan, “It’s not good news, I’m afraid,” and Nan had sucked hard on her teeth, then said, “At least her face is fine.”
Nan only explained once she came out of hospital. She lowered her voice in case the neighbors could hear and said, “Never tell a man straightaway, or you’ll never pass go. Wait until the time is right, when they love you for you, Rita, and then you might stand a chance.”
She explains how the time was never “right” enough to tell Fred. After he proposed, she didn’t want to ruin things, not when they saw each other so infrequently anyway, her being in London with the Harringtons, him in Torquay. But he kept going on and on about children, how he needed a son to take on the family business, and how their son would be big and strong, just like Rita, with his father’s eye for the meatiest cut of shin and brisket, the juiciest slice of tongue.
What could she do? Once married, she could hardly pretend, month after month, they’d just been unlucky. And didn’t he say he loved her to bits? So she called him from the phone box on the corner of the Harringtons’ crescent: “I got damaged, Fred. Down there. I won’t have kids.” The shocked pause went on forever.
“But I’d never have asked you to marry me if you’d told me,” he’d said eventually. And she’d realized she’d known that all along.
There. It’s out. Rita stares up at the sky. The moonlight falls on her bare skin like rain.
“Lucky,” he says.
“Lucky?” she repeats, with a hollow laugh. Her heart is one big bruise.
“You found out Fred’s true character before you walked down the aisle.” Robbie rolls on top of her, pinning her down, weighting his body’s length against hers. She doesn’t register she’s crying until he wipes her tears away with his thumb. “And I’m a lucky bugger too. Because you’re not married to that idiot and this means I can kiss you from your head to your toes.”
And every crevice besides. God. She had no idea such sensations existed. Lying back on the ground afterward, her body quivering, trying to catch her racing breath, she feels . . . reborn. Robbie reaches for her hand and brings it to his mouth, skimming her knuckles with his lips, and she smiles, so lost in him, the warm summer’s night, she doesn’t hear the distant gunshots, muted by the trees.
38
Hera
I didn’t want to kill anything. And I wouldn’t have gone shooting at all if Don hadn’t kicked the terrarium, and the baby hadn’t started screaming at the top of her lungs and Teddy hadn’t run in, followed by Mother, bewildered in a flowing black dress embroidered with teeny sequiny chips of mirror. I roared at her, “He’s an animal! LOOK what he’s done!” But she just stood there, refusing to look at the shattered glass case—or who Don really was.
“Obviously, it was an accident,” Don said, rubbing the side of his nose.
Mother said, “Get the dustpan and brush, Hera.” She walked toward the sofa and picked up the screaming baby. Baby Forest had never cried like that before. She looked terrified, all bulging and rigid. “There, there,” Mother said, cuddling her tight. “It’s all right, it’s all right, sweetpea.” But it wasn’t all right. And the baby knew it. She kept on crying, like an alarm going off, arching her back, and I knew, and probably Mother knew, the only person who was able to calm her down was Big Rita. But Big Rita wasn’t there. And we had no idea when she might be back.
“So are we going shooting?” Teddy said, hopping from foot to foot, agitated.
I mouthed, “No.”
“I don’t think . . .” Don drew a hand along his cheek. He suddenly looked exhausted. “Not tonight, Teddy.”
Mother, dancing and jigging in little circles with the baby, trying to soothe her, said sharply, “Go, Don. Really. Then I can get things under control here. Shh, baby.”
Don shook his head. He looked shocked by himself. In a daze.
“Go!” Mother shouted, panicked by the baby’s screams, the red ribbon of noise. “I can’t settle the baby with you here. Just go.” She suddenly sounded like she hated him too. She turned to me. “Would you go too? Please, Hera.” I couldn’t say no. I knew she wanted me to go to keep an eye on Teddy. I think Don knew too.
“Jeannie, I really don’t think that’s a very good idea,” he said with a small laugh.
“I’ll go,” I said. There was no way Teddy was going out with him alone.
A couple of minutes later, like he was trying to prove something, Don pressed a gun into my hand. “Do your worst.”
* * *
We soon lost Don, tracking something or other. I held Teddy’s hand so he couldn’t follow him. Once Don was out of sight, no danger to us anymore, I roared and turned in a circle and beat my chest, like the stupid silverback gorilla Don thought he was, and we both started giggling. In the hush, the sound grew around us, coming from all directions, as if there were dozens of madly giggling children hidden in the trees. By then we were in the thick copse of pines, where the ground is dry and crunchy, skiddy with needles, and the air is completely still, like the inside of a wardrobe. When we stopped laughing, Teddy got spooked. I led him away from the pines until we could see the sky again, the lights of a plane arcing across it, like a spaceship. My arm was aching from carrying the gun. And I wanted to curl up in the soft, powdery hollow of a tree and sleep, arms around Teddy, rather than go back to Foxcote. Or see the broken glass on the floor. Thinking about the terrarium made an urgent anger hiss through me. And that’s all I remember, the sudden fume of fury, and my heart, like a big bass drum, then Teddy pointing at a moving far-off shape and hissing, “Deer! Deer! Shoot!”
The bullet rang out before I decided to fire. The gun punched my shoulder. The evening shattered into a zillion fragments.
We stood there a moment, not saying anything, our ears ringing, like church bells. I imagined the deer bleeding out. Suffering. But I wasn’t sure I’d be brave enough to give the animal another shot to save it from further pain. So I threw the gun down and we ran back to Foxcote.
That was almost an hour ago. I clean my teeth with a trembling hand.
A knock on the bathroom door. “Hera? You in there?”
I startle at the sound of Big Rita’s voice and drop my toothbrush into the plastic beaker.
“So how was your evening?” She pushes open the door slightly. Through the gap I can see she’s grinning madly. Her hair is all messed up, like a herd of cows have licked it. She smells of bonfire and happiness. This tells me one thing: she hasn’t seen her precious terrarium. Yet.
I don’t answer. She follows me into my bedroom and bounces on the side of my bed, making it creak. Her smile fades. “Teddy’s in a flump too. Anyone going to tell me what’s the matter?”
It’s like someone’s died. All the happiness drains from Rita’s whitening face. “Smashed?” she repeats, unable to believe it.
“Kicked in.” My voice sounds watery. “By Don.”
“Don?” she repeats blankly. The clock ticks on the wall. Her eyes start to blaze. Like I’ve never seen them. Dagger gold, not brown. And she seems to grow bigger, more powerful, as if she could crush Don’s skull in her hand, like a ripe peach. “I’ll stand up to him this time, Hera.” A new Big Rita is talking. She strides to the door. “I’ll make the bugger leave. Right.” She frowns. She hesitates. “Hang on a minute, where is he?”
39
Sylvie
My advice, as your older and much wiser sister, is to venture no further than the range of the television remote control,” says Caroline, on the phone. There’s a steely strain in her voice: she’s not joking. I feel disloyal: I’ve not told her everything. Self-doubt begins to creep in. “Stop it, you!” she shouts, and it takes me a beat to realize she’s addressing one of her children, stage left in her American life. “Spike! Alfie’s digging up the lawn with a spoon. Sorry, Sylvie, what was I saying?”
“I shouldn’t go back to the forest,” I say sheepishly, feeling like I’ve been caught rashly digging up my life too.