by Eve Chase
She’s pretty sure the landlady, Mrs. Catton, has rummaged through the rest of her things, searching for contraband. (“No alcohol. No smoking. No male visitors. No hot bath deeper than six inches.”) It was definitely a mistake to tell her she was modeling to pay the rent.
Anyway, she could hardly have applied for another nanny job, even if she’d wanted to. Modeling has been an unlikely godsend.
She’d been doing twelve-hour days waitressing in a restaurant in Mayfair when the woman from the agency tapped her on the shoulder with a French-polished fingernail. Had she ever considered modeling? She’d thought it was a cruel joke at first. But the woman wasn’t laughing: she was sizing up her newly skinny figure, all bones since she’d lost her appetite. Nothing puts you off food like working with it, and she didn’t feel she deserved nice things anymore. Suspecting the woman needed her eyes tested, Rita took the stiff cream card and used it as a bookmark for at least a month. The idea that she could model was absurd. Models were beautiful. She was plain. She’d always been plain. Apart from that night with Robbie, when she’d felt like a goddess. In the end, though, curiosity—and money—got the better of her.
Now she earns more in five hours than she did as a waitress in twelve. For the first time in her life, her height is an asset. Her body is on her side. She’s found it reassuring and empowering to meet other towering girls with size 10 feet, girls you wouldn’t necessarily call pretty, either. No one’s laughing at them now. “It’s a ‘look,’” as the agency woman says, puffing on her cigarette. And one she no longer minds so much.
The work consists mostly of behind-the-scenes fitting model stuff. It was mortifying at first, standing there in her underwear, until she realized she was simply a mannequin and her thoughts were her own. And she liked the brisk, matronly seamstresses, their precision and industry, their light, cool fingers, the maternal way they talk to her sometimes. Her scars mean she can’t do catwalk, although there’s one photographer—dead famous, sounds like a Cockney market stallholder—who is desperate to photograph her naked and record the scars, “like tribal markings.” But she feels strongly that they are her story, not his, and she stubbornly won’t do it, much to the frustration of the agency. The last thing she wants is fame. Just money. Independence. Never to be reliant on a man like Walter Harrington again. Any man actually. Soon she’ll have saved enough to put down a deposit on a flat of her own. Beyond this, she can’t imagine. There’s a fog in her brain, like the one over the city today, where her old plans and enthusiasms and the future used to be. She wonders what advice her mother, Poppy, might give, if she were alive. And the wondering makes her feel sad and cheated.
The landlady’s distinct three-knuckled rap.
Rita tenses. The old bat. “Yes?”
Mrs. Catton shoves open the door. Her working eye rolls around the room, checking for signs of disrepute. The other, milky and blank, stares straight ahead. She takes a puff of her cigarette—“a landlady’s prerogative”—and steps over the threshold. Rita hates the invasion. It always takes her a few minutes to reinhabit the room after she’s left. “I’ve told you the rules, Rita.”
“You have,” Rita says coolly. Even her voice sounds older and deeper now: she’s grown up fast. A few months ago, she’d have been hopping about trying to ingratiate herself. She won’t anymore. Not after her experience with the Harringtons. The meek don’t inherit the earth. She’s no longer scared to take up space. “But I don’t believe I’ve broken any, Mrs. Catton.”
The landlady exhales a yellowy twist of Rothmans. “Not yet.”
Rita frowns, fighting irritation. “I’m not following, sorry.”
“No male visitors,” the landlady barks. The puff of breath is putrid.
“I have had no visitors, male or female, since I moved in, and don’t intend to. Now, if you don’t mind, Mrs. Catton, I’ve got to get myself ready for work . . .”
Mrs. Catton glances over the hunched bulkhead of her shoulder into the dark communal stairwell, the cigarette balancing between her lips. “Well, there’s a fella at the door. I can’t get rid of him. Says he has news about some baby.”
47
Hera, Now
A cloud of melon vape hangs like the ghost of a fruit salad in the hall. I flap it away with my hands. “What is that dreadful stuff? I preferred it when you smoked like a power station, Edie.”
“Darling, you think I don’t? But times have changed. And so have I.” Edie stuffs the vape machine—it looks unsettlingly like a pistol—into her handbag. “Thanks for an impeccable cup of Earl Grey. Better shoot. On a deadline.”
I eye my aunt dubiously, suspecting she’s making excuses to leave and escape the conversation and all my angsting. “Really? You haven’t got your deadline face on.”
Brow furrowed. Bottom lip bitten. The metallic clatter of typewriter keys. I grew up with all of that. Edie was preoccupied a lot of the time. She’d ask me and Teddy about our homework but wouldn’t listen to our answers—she was thinking about her writing. “The rabbit did it for me,” I said once, as a test, and she said absently, “Great work, darling,” and banged out another line of copy. But when the article was finished, she’d always bundle us on to the top of a bus for ice-cream sundaes in Hyde Park or lunch in Piccadilly. We loved those days. But I haven’t tasted ice cream for over twenty years. Or taken the bus in five. Or the tube. Not when the city grows more violent by the day. The flu strains more virulent. And the panic attacks that started after my husband died—and I lost my last buffer against the past—became harder to disguise. Without him, I feel peeled, shucked, vulnerable to every shove and cough. Since the latest family drama kicked off—I mean, when will it end?—I can feel the rev of panic again, the fear that I might unravel like my mother.
“Well, not a deadline exactly. But I’m extremely busy.” Edie looks worryingly pleased with herself and waits for me to ask about the source of her latest busyness.
“What with?” I ask, dutifully playing along.
Her lips twitch into a smile. “Setting up an Instagram account.”
“Heavens. What on earth about?”
“My newsmag years. Feminism. Fashion. I’m going to turn myself into a national treasure.” She grins and rattles the chunky resin bangles on her wrist. “Hell, why not?”
I stare at her for a moment, my tiny withered bright-eyed aunt, framed against the Colefax and Fowler foliate wallpaper, like an exotic bird. “I’m going to put that on your gravestone. Here lies Edie Harrington, who looked at the world and asked, ‘Hell, why not?’”
She giggles. “I doubt it. Since I’ll outlive you, vaping my melon sorbet. Now if you don’t mind . . .” She brushes past me, trailing the sharp citric men’s cologne she’s always worn.
I feel a mix of affection and neediness, as I always do when she leaves, and an urge to hug her, which I never act upon. Most people I’ve hugged in my life have either died or disappeared. But Edie and I understand each other, and that’s enough. She knows she saved my life.
The leukemia knocked at our door with no warning. Mother was dead two weeks after diagnosis, four months after coming home from The Lawns. The young, bored nanny who’d replaced Rita upped and left, saying the job was too difficult. Daddy tried to be Mother, but he couldn’t boil an egg and had business abroad. So Edie gave up her rented apartment and foreign post and moved in to look after us. Nobody could believe it or expected it to work. She couldn’t boil an egg, either, but knew where to eat out. She got an editorial job in London, on a magazine, and filled the house with hacks and artists and people who needed a bed for the night. It was a revelation. The conventions and anxieties that had governed my parents’ lives simply didn’t apply to Edie. She never married. She had a job and a million friends instead. And us. She was the first and only person in my life to say, “Don’t worry what other people think, be who you want to be. Hell, why not, Hera?” So I did. I reinvented myself
. Years later, I even took a photograph of Mother to a plastic surgeon and said, “Can you fix me a nose like hers?” I still look nothing like her.
When Mother was discharged from The Lawns, she didn’t resemble herself much, either. She had lost so much weight, and her dark hair had turned white and started to fall out in clumps. But she was delighted to be home, which was, by then, a house in Bloomsbury, smaller and scruffier, far away from the gossips of Primrose Hill. She and Daddy had separate bedrooms with an interlinked door that I think Daddy hoped would one day be unlocked. (It never was.) In a funny way, we were the closest we’d ever been in that house. Everything felt tender and quiet but hopeful, like after surgery.
Edie said to me, “Only the trees know what went on in the woods that night.” My father wouldn’t speak of it, or of Don. They never discussed the case in front of me. I’d later learn it had fallen apart. Father sold the mine and company shares to pay for the lawyers. I once tentatively asked Mother if she’d really shot Don, and she’d hesitated, her face a cross-stitch of feelings I couldn’t read, her eyes full of tears, then replied, “It wasn’t you. You mustn’t ever think it was you, Hera. That’s all that matters.” But a part of me did. A part of me still does. I’d shot something that night. And although I didn’t try to kill Don, I’d wished him scrubbed from the face of the earth so many times.
Officers would occasionally still come round, and my parents would quickly usher us upstairs. Teddy and I would sit, terrified, huddled together, in case they took Mother away again. Lawyers appeared. Doctors. Newspaper reporters would knock on our front door, and we’d be told to duck from the windows and pull the curtains shut. I’ve never lost the sense that the world might shoulder-barge into my life again and take away someone I love. I still feel comfortable in my house only with the blinds shut. So Edie’s new enthusiasm unnerves me. “Don’t put any photos of me on social media, Edie, will you?”
“Cripes, I wouldn’t dare, darling.” Edie opens the front door and grins at the city, the cars and people swimming past. She winks. “You’d break the interweb.”
“Internet. It’s called the internet, Edie.” I touch her sleeve lightly. “Before you go, tell me what to do, Edie. Please.” There’s only one opinion that counts.
“I’ve never told you what to do.” She purses her lips together, so that all the old smoker’s lines ray out. “I don’t believe in it.” A police helicopter whirs overhead.
“I’ve tried throwing money at the problem. I’ve tried reason.”
She turns to face me, more sternly. “Have you tried giving up?”
“What?” I laugh, the idea preposterous.
“It’s out of your hands, darling. So you either give in fighting. Or you give in with grace and kindness.” Edie smiles at me, slightly exasperated. “You’ll make yourself ill if you go on like this.” She squints down the street. “When’s the next number 22 due?”
“God invented taxis for a reason.” To save us from crowds and crime and norovirus and me breaking into a cold sweat, unable to breathe.
“Well, you’re missing out. The conversations on buses, my goodness. I take notes!”
“You would.”
“Good luck.” Her clawlike hand squeezes mine. “Let me know how it goes, Hera.”
“Don’t call me that.”
“Oops. The ancient mind slips, darling. Sorry.” She doesn’t look very sorry. My aunt is constitutionally incapable of regret. But she’s kind. “You’ll always be Hera to me, my dear plump mad Hera.”
“For goodness sake.” I shake my head.
“Well, at my age . . .”
“Edie, I’ve been called Helen Latham for thirty-three bloody years.” I flick a bit of lint from her navy jacket collar. “And I weigh one hundred and ten pounds. Thank you very much.”
48
Sylvie
Elliot and Annie are sitting a continent apart on the sofa, their eyes drilling into the floor. “How’s it going?” I ask unnecessarily.
“Great,” Elliot answers when Annie says nothing. The air crackles.
I’ve given them an hour’s privacy: a fake mission to buy a pint of milk. “Did Annie tell you we’ve bought a cot?” I slide the milk carton I don’t need into the fridge. “Two, actually. One for here. One for her dad’s. Hugely reduced. A bargain.” Still a fortune. Annie made me buy them. I’m a softer touch than Steve. “Didn’t expect them to arrive quite so soon, though, did we, Annie?”
“No,” Annie says quietly, coloring.
If it were up to Annie, she’d have bought everything by now. Maybe all new mothers try to buy a bit of confidence, not realizing that when the baby’s screaming at four in the morning, the brand of changing mat really won’t matter. But for Annie I think it’s also a way of staving off her fears for Mum, whose condition remains perilous. Partly for this reason, I haven’t told Annie about my trip to the forest last week, not wanting to add Marge or Jo to the mix. “A beer, Elliot? I’ve got some cold ones here.”
Annie shoots me an eye-widening look that says, “Mum.” Okay, perhaps the meeting to discuss “practicalities” hasn’t gone so brilliantly. And I’m making it worse.
“Annie can’t drink, so I’ll do the same.” He shoots a cautious glance at Annie, who looks regally unmoved by such sacrifice. A moment later she glances back at him, pretending not to. I’m aware of a certain hormonal heat in the room.
Elliot stands up, pulls on his shirt cuffs nervously. “Guess I better shoot, then.” He waits for Annie to say, No, do stay.
She doesn’t. “I’m off too.”
They both leap up from the sofa with awkward synchrony. “Bye then,” murmurs Annie, not meeting his eye.
To my surprise, and Annie’s, Elliot reaches out and hugs her. “Let me know if there’s anything I can do,” he whispers into her hair.
Annie closes her eyes—I’m about to creep away, discreetly—then pulls back roughly, as if coming to her senses. “I’m pregnant, not disabled.”
Christ. “He is trying,” I mouth to her as he shuffles dejectedly to the front door. My heart aches for them both.
* * *
“It’s Elliot’s baby in there too, Annie,” I say afterward.
Annie picks up her handbag. “It’s going to be a Broom, not a Latham.”
“I just wonder . . .” I say carefully.
“What?” Annie’s nostrils flare, alert for any disloyalty.
“There is a palpable energy between you two. I can feel it.”
“A sort of you-screwed-my-life sort of energy?”
“No. A spark. An attraction. The way he hugged you, Annie . . .”
She scoffs. But her eyes fill with tears. She looks away, trying to hide them from me.
“Could you not try to make it work, sweetheart?”
She bites down on her lip and shakes her head, muttering something about Elliot not wanting the baby, Elliot wasting no time moving on to someone else.
I wonder if it’s the same girl Helen described on the phone to me. “Family friend, works at Christie’s. Very tolerant of the Situation,” she’d said. “Maybe you could have a little chat with Annie about it.” The cheek.
“Anyway, it’s much better for the baby to have always known their parents separated, than to try and fail and psychologically damage them with a split,” she says. “All the experts say so.”
Ouch. I bite my tongue, trying not to take it personally.
“I’m going to see Granny.” She walks to the front door and opens it. London rushes in, humid and heavy. “Play her the forest recording again. The woodpecker.”
My thoughts run, screaming, arms in the air, back in the direction of the forest. Marge. Fingers. “Okay, Annie. Good luck.”
* * *
I can’t stop thinking about Marge’s ramblings. Muddled, Fingers said. But she’s certainly not gaga. In fact, she see
med relatively lucid, albeit off message. I don’t know what to believe.
I’ve picked up the phone to call Caroline many times, then put it down again. I don’t want to send her loopy too. Also, old habits die hard: I can’t shift the belief that if I keep all this secret, I can contain it, shape it, stop the past spewing onto the present. And the present is growing more urgent. Every day, Annie’s unborn baby journeys closer to the cot in the bedroom, over which the tree mobile hangs, quivering, waiting.
I’ve done my bit, haven’t I? Taken Annie to the forest, at least. Why risk digging deeper? Mum was protecting us from something, I’m sure of that now. In this strange hinterland between life and death, a place where I cannot grieve for her or move on, I make a decision to leave it alone. Right now, my focus needs to be on the baby. Annie. Mum. Work.
I write an email to my agent, trying to sound dynamic: Dear Pippa, How are things? Can we have a catch-up on the phone this week? I press send. The doorbell rings.
“Sylvie.” Helen marches into my apartment. Intense. Wearing flats. Something’s up. Has Elliot reported back already? Maybe he doesn’t want his firstborn sleeping in an end-of-line bargain cot but instead in something festooned with antique Parisian lace. “How was the cold war summit?”
I hesitate. Settle on optimism. “They’ll get there.” She looks worried at such a prospect. “Helen, come and see the nursery.” For once, Annie’s room is scrupulously tidy due to Elliot’s visit. I can risk it.
“Very early to do the nursery, Sylvie. You don’t want to tempt Fate.” For a moment she seems frightened, as if the worst thing wouldn’t be Annie’s having the baby but Annie’s losing it.
“God, I know. But the cot arrived yesterday and Annie insisted we erect it and see what it looked like. I spent hours in flat-pack purgatory last night. You’ve no idea. Have a peep. Annie’s out. She won’t mind.” She will. But I want to reassure Helen that we’re more together than we appear. Also, she suggested Elliot coming over today. Her razor edges appear to be blunting a little.