The Ophelia Girls

by Jane Healey

  ‘You don’t have a lighter, do you?’ he asks, taking out a cigarette from a battered pack.

  ‘No.’ Her face brushes against the flowers, a petal smearing across her chin. She wishes she did have a lighter, that she could pass it over to him and he could nod a thanks around the cigarette, that she could watch his stubbled cheeks suck in with the first sharp inhale. ‘My dad might have one, although he’s not supposed to.’ Her father gave up smoking when she was born, but the stress of her time in hospital turned him back to the habit. Another thing to feel guilty for.

  ‘A terrible example to make,’ Stuart teases. He folds the cigarette into his palm. ‘You know, you look just like a Pre-Raphaelite painting, with the flowers and your hair,’ he says, and she feels dazed, thrilled, and hopes it doesn’t show on her face.

  He blinks and looks down at his feet like he might be secretly shy. ‘I’m sorry,’ he says, ‘I bet that comparison gets old.’

  ‘No,’ she says, her body hot now as if it’s midday. No one has ever noticed the resemblance except her, gazing at the postcards of paintings pinned to her wall, the girls with their ruddy red hair and plaintive expressions.

  ‘Like the Lady of Shalott. Or Ophelia,’ he says, eyes meeting hers again, a small smile on his lips as his voice trails off.

  The vase is getting heavier, like her arms are being tugged out of their sockets, but she doesn’t want to leave. She doesn’t want Stuart to go back to the table either. Then someone calls for the wine and he bends to pick it up.

  ‘I think I’ll stay inside now, can you tell my mother?’ she says, feeling embarrassed by that word, mother.

  ‘Sure. But you’re all right?’ he checks, looking at her carefully.

  No, she thinks of saying. ‘I’m fine.’

  In the cool of the house, which is always dark, no matter the weather or the time of day outside, the wood a dark Victorian stain, the wallpaper in the hall a faded striped yellow, her foot slips on the worn-down tiles. Water slops on her feet from the vase and she wants to cry.

  Chapter Two

  Even dosed with wine, I still wake up from another nightmare, my t-shirt stuck to my chest with sweat, the feeling of watery weeds slipping over my ankles making me kick at the covers with a panicked moan.

  Sheets shoved down to my hips, I stare at the ceiling as my breathing slows, trying to think of something other than water, than the river.

  Alex is still asleep, his body ripe, his dreams peaceful. He’s never woken easily. I used to have to plonk the twins right on him to get him to help them settle when they were crying and I was despairing of not having enough arms or leaking breasts or motherly reserves left to care for them. Twins. I love them but I would never do that again, I’m not sure now how I even survived those first years. If Maeve had been sick in that first year, and not later when they could be farmed out to nurseries for a portion of the day, I might well have gone mad.

  Now that I’m awake, I can hear it. A drip somewhere in the house, soft and echoing. I picture a pool forming in a basin, picture it rising and rising and slipping over the edge onto the floor below, crawling out towards other rooms, wet and thick.

  This house has five bathrooms. Our ensuite, the upstairs family bathroom, the smaller guest bathroom, the downstairs loo, and the outside toilet which the gardener used to use. Five bathrooms with leaky taps, with mildewed tiles and splotches of rusty mould, with ageing groaning pipes that need to be replaced as a matter of urgency. Alex sees the excesses of this house – all the rooms that a family of five don’t actually need – as something to be proud of, to revel in. I see them as extra work, as caverns where money will get flung and lost in an attempt to keep this old house, my father’s house, from crumbling.

  I go in search of the sound, pausing outside my children’s rooms, waiting to hear their easy breaths. I always feel a low panic that something might have happened to them, that they might have slipped away as I slept. When Maeve was sick and home from hospital, it wasn’t enough to stand outside her door; I used to crouch by her bed and watch her, note the shadows under her eyes and her laboured breaths. Sometimes Alex found me there in the morning, slumped on the floor in a restless doze. You’ll tire yourself out, he used to say, she’s fine.

  She’s fine – a phrase meant to comfort but one that only ever made me want to protest that she’s not, she’s not fine, and I didn’t notice it when it first began, I didn’t listen when she said she was tired and breathless. I called it growing pains and told her she was fine.

  The leaking tap is in the guest bathroom, the one so narrow that you can sit on the toilet and reach the sink and the bath at the same time. Now, as I stand in front of the sink in the dark, I cup a hand under each tap to find the culprit, or as if I am waiting for some kind of blessing, I think. For a moment, nothing, and then a cold drop in my right palm that rolls down the inside of my wrist.

  In the shadowed mirror, I am ageless, unrecognizable. I could be her, my teen self, awake at night with giddy thoughts, restless with sadness, wishing to be anywhere but here. It could be the start of that summer, and I might be able to stop it happening before it did.

  I was the one who took the first photograph of a girl in the river, and sometimes I think this means I am to blame for everything. It was a picture of Joan Summers. Joan Summers, with her straight black hair and watery blue eyes that looked eerie and old in some of the washed-out photographs.

  She used to wear a particular stripy halterneck dress she’d bought on the King’s Road that she had shrunk in a hot wash to show off her knickers, and had a reputation for being a good-time girl. If my mother had been alive, she might have called her ‘trouble’; although maybe she wouldn’t – not having any memories of my mother, not even the press of my baby cheek against her woollen jumper, or the touch of her soft palm on my forehead, I do not know what she was really like.

  Joan’s parents were drama teachers and later we would use their theatre programmes, the covers and illustrations in their books on Hamlet, along with the reproductions of Millais’ Ophelia in my art books, to align our own visions with that of Shakespeare’s heroine, but before that our inspiration had been more primal, innate, as if a drowning girl lived inside each of us waiting to be discovered.

  It was me and Joan and one of the other girls that day – though who exactly I forget, maybe because by the end of our time in the river we became in some ways interchangeable, as if the water had softened the delineations between us – and we were walking along the riverbank in the sun, singing a James Taylor song with drooping daisy chains around our thin wrists. We threw sticks in the river to race, and when hers got stuck under a mossy root, I dared Joan to go in and get it. That day she was wearing a white, frothy peasant’s blouse, and as she swore at us and clambered into the water to get to the other side of the river, the water made it billow out, turned it see-through so we could see the much-envied lacy brassiere she wore underneath.

  I had a camera with me. I remember thinking that that year was important, worth recording, as if our small teenage lives could be set against the whirlwind happening in London, New York, San Francisco, Vietnam.

  She turned around triumphantly when she had retrieved the stick and saw me unclipping the camera case.

  Take a picture of this! she called. Of me drowning in the river. And then she swooned back with a laugh, with a theatrical wave of her arm, and I thought, Yes, yes, this, and something inside me trembled, bloomed. I crouched on the bank and Joan tipped her head back, stick forgotten and floating further downstream, her blouse borne up around her, her legs pale in the glittering green waters, the daisy chain joined by a fern frond that tangled around her throat.

  Afterwards, I pushed the camera into Joan’s hands to take my turn. And oh, that first step into the river, the cold of the water, the stones sore on my toes – could anything ever be sweeter than that?

  It looked calm from the bank but a river isn’t like a swimming pool, you don’t slip easily into it a
nd then lie placid; there’s a current that wants to nudge you onwards, weeds and leaves and flotsam, stones and rocks underneath you, branches and roots like outstretched arms reaching towards you. The light on river water on a hot summer’s day is blinding, brilliant in its patterns, the branches of the willows above dizzying in their detail as the lip of the water dances across your skin and the gurgling underwater world washes into your ears.

  It was then, I think, that I understood baptism, and it was then that my body first felt alive, my own.

  We didn’t leave the river until we started chattering with the cold, until the sky grew dark with heavy clouds, and as we clambered through the woods, our clothes slapping against our prickling skin, we felt washed ashore on some strange new land. And when the photos were developed, when I cycled back from the village with the sealed packet, and the four of us sat underneath a tree with our mouths sticky from toffees twisted out of shiny wrappers, our legs criss-crossed over one another’s, and we saw ourselves transformed by the lens and the film, the leaking light of the old camera like the golden light in the painting of a saint, like the summer sun blinding us, we felt a new thrum of power, of possibility.

  Where did that possibility go? I think now, my hand aching as I try in vain to turn the cold tap tighter to stop the drip, as if fixing this one thing will prove I have some small modicum of control over this house. Where did the hopes and dreams of that girl go, the one who swore she wouldn’t do what was expected of her, that she would live a life free of the shackles of marriage and children, that she would travel and make art, and leave these dark stifling rooms behind and never return?

  I don’t regret the children, not when they hold a piece of my heart inside them, but I would do anything not to be here, surrounded by my father’s belongings, by my memories. There are no new answers to be found from this house, from the fields, the woods and the river, even if my dreams are searching for them. Only regrets, I think, as the sound of the dripping tap, a mocking metronome, follows me back to bed.

  Chapter Three

  The next day, Maeve takes longer than usual standing in front of her wardrobe, dissatisfied with every top, skirt, dress she has. She doesn’t remember the last time she went shopping; she hasn’t had the energy for it, nor the mental fortitude to deal with packs of teenagers roaming the aisles of Topshop and Miss Selfridge, so she’s just been wearing her hospital clothes – soft and shapeless – or ordered from catalogues. She’s slim but not too thin any more, she thinks, as she lifts up the large t-shirt she sleeps in, glancing nervously to the closed door of her bedroom and the curtains drawn across her bay window before she looks at herself in the mirror, eyes tripping from scar to scar. Her periods might have come late and still be irregular, but she looks like a woman: breasts, hips, dip of her waist above the hipbones that jut out of her skin like buried pottery shards.

  Last night she wore a short-sleeved gypsy blouse and knee-length skirt, both made of cheap, stretchy fabric. Today what she wants is a slip dress, slinky, silken, in some pastel shade. But she’ll have to settle for a denim skirt and a plain purple top with a peasant neckline, the one she hasn’t worn before because it shows off the thumb-sized raised scar from the port below her left collarbone.

  ‘You look nice today, darling,’ her mother says at breakfast, and Maeve shrugs awkwardly.

  Her mother is wearing a large sleeveless shirt and a pair of corduroy shorts that look mannish on her athletic build.

  ‘We haven’t talked much about the summer,’ she continues, watching Maeve as she circles a spoon in the half-eaten Ricicles gone soggy.

  Her mother used to worry about what she ate, used to stare at each spoonful Maeve lifted to her mouth as if it were the only thing that stood between her and death. Appetite was a marker in hospital, a small triumph remarked upon by nurses and doctors and other parents. Oh, she’s getting her appetite back now, they’d say with knowing pleasure, with a jangling kind of relief.

  ‘I’ll get some strawberries in tomorrow,’ her mother murmurs, and rinses out her own coffee cup. ‘Summer,’ she begins again. ‘Have you thought about what you might like to do? There’s some courses at the village. Art, music. Or we could get a tutor to come here if you like, if you’re worried about catching up with school. And your father and I talked about taking you lot on a proper holiday, down south maybe. What do you think?’ she asks, with a look of such tender hope it makes something inside Maeve squish, like stepping on a too-ripe fruit.

  She winces, scrapes her spoon against the curve of the bowl. ‘I just want to rest.’

  ‘Of course,’ her mother says, and rests a hand on her shoulder. ‘But let me know if you change your mind. We could visit a historical house, or go to London and see a show, whatever you want.’

  After breakfast Maeve returns to her room and lies on her bed, feeling her stomach gurgle. She turns her head to look at the wall of posters and postcards she put up in a brief manic burst her first week here because the tiny pattern of the old wallpaper was making her dizzy, because she wanted to make this space hers and not her mother’s. She might have continued and plastered the other walls too, but her mother had said, Oh, that looks nice, when she came into the room the next day, and it had soured the whole thing.

  Now, Maeve’s eyes trace the fashion editorials as slow bass beats throb through her head from her Discman. A woman in a dress with a long train, sitting on a rearing horse. A woman lying on a pile of pastel mattresses, a modern Sleeping Beauty. Two women in white summer dresses, in a field blanched yellow with light. A glamorous girl slumped next to a large perfume bottle with a man in a sharp suit frowning at her, his hand curled tightly around her upper arm. The pictures of actors and actresses cut out of magazines, the handful of photos of a young childhood that seems so far away: her on her father’s shoulders, her with a toothy smile holding the twins in her lap, her in a too-large tourist t-shirt frowning at the beach. And lastly, the images that have been on her mind recently, the postcards of paintings, mostly of women: Impressionist, Pre-Raphaelite, Renaissance.

  She bought the postcards on the trips the hospital school took to galleries. When her mother had taken her round art galleries as a child, she had been bored, bought only pencils and colourful rubbers in the gift shop with the usual proffered 50p. But her trips with the raggle-taggle group of sick kids – with their headwraps and wheelchairs and oxygen canisters and shuffling feet – had been glorious. There was something slyly enjoyable about being part of such a group, about the pity and curiosity they created amongst the other gallerygoers.

  Here is your sick youth, Georgia, her best friend, murmured gleefully in her ear once as a woman gawped at them. Here are the ghouls and ghosties you hide away. You too might get sick and die! she declared, making her thin arm shake as she pointed at an elderly man, and Maeve muffled a laugh that hurt her chest.

  Sitting in front of the paintings then – at the Tate, at the National Gallery – or the sculptures and statues in the British Museum and the V&A, Maeve had an appreciation of their beauty that was agonizingly sincere. She had felt the contrast of her daily life – the fluorescent halls of the ward, the thick plastic bars of her bed, the ache in her body – set against the cool, marble-floored buildings with ceilings that soared like a cathedral, the rich gold of the frames and the wonders they encased: seascapes and picturesque ruins, women in every era of costume, Eden-like gardens, sunsets and sunrises, gods and goddesses, dresses of silk and lace and fur and samite. She had fallen a little in love too with the guides their teacher had arranged, in their tweed jackets, their black sheath dresses or old-fashioned cardigans; the way their eyes glimmered with worship when they looked at the art they were describing, the point when they ran out of words and shrugged with a wry smile as if to say, I know I’ll never be able to explain fully, I know our language isn’t good enough, but just look.

  She tries to summon that feeling now as she looks at her postcards, tries to breathe her way into the memory. The warm wo
oden bench under her; Georgia beside her saying wow under her breath and meaning it; the haziness of her painkillers dropping away for a moment of pure searing pleasure that had nothing to do with her broken body, nothing to do with herself at all.

  But here, now, her leg is itchy and her stomach aches; the pictures have the sheen of printed paper obscuring their surfaces; and she is alone. Her heart flutters with a single shake of panic, and she tugs out her earphones and sits up, rakes a hand through her hair.

  At dinner on the patio in the back garden, the twins are fractious, whining and tired from a day of too much sun. Her mother sighs as she tries to get them to sit up straight, to eat their dinner, and her dad’s jokes fall flat, Iza turning up her nose as if she is some rich old lady watching a terrible play, her curls frizzy around her face as though they have been set in rollers. Iza has the same dirty blonde hair as her father, and so does Michael. Maeve used to, but when her hair grew back from the chemo it was red like her mother’s was as a girl.

  Maeve is sitting at the other end of the table to her father, her usual favourite spot, but today, with Stuart there at dinner, she feels exposed, awkward, her eyes stuck on the dry wood of the table, grey with so many summers’ exposure.

  The house phone next to her father’s elbow rings and he answers it quickly, striding back inside to his office. After a hastily served yoghurt, uneaten by the twins, her mother declares tightly that it’s bedtime and guides her youngest back into the house.

  Stuart smiles politely at Maeve. She should say something, she thinks, mouth sour with yoghurt, she should make the most out of these minutes when it’s just her and him.

  ‘Shall we take some of this stuff inside then?’ he offers, stretching his arms over his head and running his hand through the waves of his hair.

  Maeve nods, the scrape of her chair wincingly loud as she stands up. She counts the objects on the table, thinking about how many trips four hands will need to clear everything.