The Ophelia Girls

by Jane Healey

  ‘It’s good to spend time with you again,’ I say.

  ‘Likewise. I’m really grateful to you and Alex for letting me stay here, especially after so long. It would be a nightmare to drive from London every day to my shoots.’

  It had been Alex who had said, Why don’t you stay with us? at lunch that day when Stuart had said he was looking for a summer bolthole. That’s all right, right, Ruth? Alex had continued and I had had the mean thought that it was all very well for Alex to offer, but it was me who was going to have to actually do the hosting.

  ‘It’s no bother. It’s good for Alex to have someone to drag on his cycle rides.’

  ‘Good old Alex,’ Stuart says, chin on the heel of his hand. ‘You know, you’ve done good, you two. Most of our contemporaries are divorced.’

  ‘Thanks, I think.’

  ‘Are you going to ask, then?’ he says, settling back in his seat.

  ‘Ask what?’

  ‘The usual. Have you been married, have you been almost married, has someone broken your heart?’

  A classic Stuart manoeuvre, undercutting your questions before you can ask them yourself. ‘Actually, I want to ask about your work, your art.’

  ‘My art,’ he repeats. ‘You mean my work out there or the glossy stuff since I’ve been back?’

  ‘Both, either.’

  ‘I struggle with it, to be honest. With being back, not being in the thick of it. I took my role as witness seriously. I can’t say that the kudos wasn’t part of it – the awards, and the thrill – but it meant something, you know.’

  ‘Why did you come back?’

  ‘It’s a young man’s game and it was getting hard to earn enough as a photographer. If I was a cameraman I might have lasted. What about you, you ever take photos any more?’

  ‘Not really, no,’ I answer carefully.

  There’s no way Stuart can stay here for the summer without the topic of the Ophelia girls being brought up, and maybe that’s why I agreed to it. Maybe it’s like when you have a scab on your knee you know you’re going to pick off just so you can feel the cold wet slide of blood down your shin. Or maybe I was just eager to have a friend; maybe the past is the past and we’re all adults now.

  ‘That’s a shame,’ he says. ‘But you still draw though?’

  ‘No. When would I have the time?’ I say, lifting my knees so that the mountain of correspondence on my lap shifts with a small earthquake.

  ‘Can I help with anything?’

  ‘It’s fine, I’m just feeling sorry for myself.’

  ‘Well, let me know if I can help with anything this summer, keep the twins busy while you draw or something. Seriously, Ruth.’

  ‘I will,’ I say, although the idea of picking up a pencil with the headspace free to draw sounds impossible, which is galling. I used to have the excuse of Maeve, of time filled with appointments and childcare and worry, but now the only thing in the way of one of my supposed passions is me.

  He stands up and stretches. ‘Will you and Alex be doing the house up then?’

  ‘Eventually.’ Just keeping the house standing is the priority, but I’m not going to reveal that. ‘We started clearing things out but it feels like an endless task.’

  ‘You find anything interesting?’ He looks around the room; at the heavy mirror above the fireplace, the paisley patterned curtains and their faded fringe. He touches the dusty edge of some shelves and looks back at me. ‘Anything surprising?’

  ‘Just antiques, schoolboy relics. And endless prints.’ Almost every wall of the house used to have them, black and grey and a murky kind of white. Prints of houses and stately buildings, scenes from old plays and staid drawings of fussy classical statues.

  ‘Gloomy things,’ he says. ‘Do you remember there was one of Hamlet meeting his father’s ghost on the wall in here? You told me that it frightened you and you didn’t like to be in here alone with it.’

  ‘I did? I don’t remember that. I mean, I remember being scared of it, but not telling you.’

  ‘We told each other lots of things,’ he says with a small smile. He glances at the family photos Michael decided should be placed on the shelf in here. ‘There weren’t many photos of you back then though.’

  A sore point. I shrug. ‘And none of my mother. Not on display at least. Did he ever talk about her, with you?’

  ‘Not really.’

  ‘I remember that I heard the housekeeper—’

  ‘Helen?’

  I nod, remembering how Stuart had been Helen’s favourite too, that I used to roll my eyes at his flirting with her for extra biscuits – I’m not flirting, he had insisted, I’m just being nice. ‘I heard Helen talking to someone once, in the kitchen during a dinner, saying that my father was devoted to her, to the memory of my mother. That he loved her too much to ever marry again. And I remember the way she said that word, devoted, like it was something out of the ordinary.’ This feels too personal to talk about with someone I haven’t seen in so many years. But there’s something about this house and its uneasy familiarity, about Stuart standing there as if he never left. ‘I don’t know,’ I say, smoothing a thumb across my father’s name on an envelope. ‘Widowers usually marry again quickly, don’t they? I suppose she was frozen at that age for him, forever young.’ Is that why I had disappointed him? Because I couldn’t live up to her perfect memory?

  Stuart winces, touching a finger to his inner lip like he’s just found a sore. ‘You would know him better than me. But first loves are always like that, aren’t they?’ He sucks his teeth. ‘They imprint on you, they’re formative.’

  I look down and the papers in my lap crinkle. Outside, a bird calls across the garden.

  ‘I better head out now,’ he says. ‘I need to pick up something from the village. You need anything?’

  ‘I’m fine, thanks.’

  As he passes, I glance at the black mirror of the television, my face smoothed of features by its murky depths.

  Chapter Seven

  This is to be the summer of dinner parties then, Maeve thinks, as she hears the sounds of her mother downstairs swearing at the oven and dropping something on the floor with a clang.

  ‘You’ll be good for your mother tonight, won’t you,’ her father is telling the twins as he sits in the upstairs hallway, and they show off their forward rolls with a thud-thud-thud on the floor. ‘It’s stressful for her, cooking.’

  ‘Why don’t you help with it then?’ Maeve asks, emerging from her bedroom.

  ‘Maeve,’ he reprimands. If she was younger he would have told her not to be so cheeky. Now she’s just rude.

  Lately, she has started to feel a curdle of dislike for her father, noticing for the first time what he is like as a man, a husband, and the friction between her mother and him, the gendered expectations upon her. But then her feelings for her mother are complicated too.

  Maeve had opened the two unsent birthday presents from her grandfather, an antique copy of an Enid Blyton book that she wasn’t much interested in, and a small wooden jewellery box which opened to reveal a ballerina spinning to a Swan Lake tune that she knew her younger self would have adored. Her mother had caught the sound through the closed door of Maeve’s bedroom and called out, That’s nice music, what is it?

  Something on the radio, Maeve had replied, wishing, not for the first time that summer, that her mother wasn’t hovering in the house, that she could have a few hours just to herself. That she could talk to Stuart without worrying about them being seen.

  Maeve ordered new clothes at the beginning of the week and she’s going to wear a new top to dinner tonight. It’s made of grey mesh with a thin silky strappy top underneath, and on its surface there are flowers embroidered in reds and greens and pinks and whites. She leaves her hair loose, tries to neaten her curls by wrapping them tightly around her index finger, tight enough to make her fingertips throb as she looks in the mirror, considering her reflection. She can’t wear much make-up; her parents would notice and comme
nt – positively, but it would still rankle – so mascara and concealer for her dark circles will have to do. She’s seen girls in period dramas pinch their cheeks to make them blush, and she does that now and then gets embarrassed, annoyed with herself for acting like a schoolgirl with a crush.

  You are a schoolgirl with a crush, she hears Georgia say in her head. Georgia would approve of what she’s doing, would tell her to be daring, but Georgia would also have hated Stuart because she always declared that she hated all men out of principle. She had made the teacher at the hospital school cry once when she went on a righteous rant about why they had to study so many great men in history lessons when they were colonialists at best. She had a certainty about her, an iron will, that Maeve couldn’t imagine having herself. I know what I’m doing, the mulish set of Georgia’s jaw seemed to say, even when the nurses thought she was self-sabotaging her recovery.

  I don’t know what I’m doing, Maeve thinks, sitting at the dressing table and peering at the back garden over the mirror, the twins wheeling about the grass as her father practises his cricket bowling, his hand cupped around air.

  She decides the minute Stuart’s eyes glance over her in the kitchen where he sits on the kitchen table that her outfit was a mistake, and wishes she could run upstairs and change without that looking worse. He’s chatting to her mother and greets her with a casual hullo to match her mother’s greeting, and then he continues his conversation, something about an art exhibition in London. Maeve makes a note of various references – the YBAs, Hirst and Emin – as she stands at the fridge with the door open, hoping the chill will stop her cheeks from going naturally pink with shame.

  ‘Excuse me, darling,’ her mother says, touching her at the waist as she flinches from her. ‘I need to put the salad in here so it doesn’t wilt. You can’t help me pick some mint for the tabbouleh, can you? I need to get changed for dinner.’ Her mother doesn’t look excited about the prospect.

  ‘Sure.’

  ‘Oh, and wash it well,’ she says, hand on the doorframe.

  ‘I’ll help,’ Stuart offers, and her mother gives him a grateful smile.

  Maeve walks outside first, the touch of her bare foot on the hot stone of the patio like a branding. ‘Shit,’ she says, ‘it’s hot.’

  ‘That’s why you should wear shoes,’ he says. She looks at his feet with her eyebrows raised. ‘I’m used to it, they’re tough as elephant’s hide. Although I still wouldn’t attempt to walk barefoot in a desert again.’

  ‘That does sound stupid,’ she retorts, pleased with his quirk of a smile.

  ‘I told you last time we spoke that I do stupid things.’

  She’d like to think he’s been turning over every small encounter they’ve had in his head like she has, but it’s enough that he remembers anything at all.

  ‘So, mint,’ he says, putting his hands on his hips as he stands before the overgrown bush that reaches beyond the windowsill. He’s standing like he’s about to wrestle an animal to the ground and she laughs. ‘It’s a serious task, Maeve, no laughing.’

  ‘I won’t laugh,’ she says, and then does just that, the tension of only two minutes ago turning into a giddy relief.

  ‘Mint is one of the worst things you can grow in a garden, you know that? It spreads like a weed and is impossible to get rid of.’

  ‘I’m sure there are worse things, like poisonous plants or ones that smell awful,’ she says, as he brushes the crown of the bush with his palm, searching for the best leaves to pick.

  ‘Touché.’

  She tries to pluck a few individual leaves but they tear in her hands. Stuart has more luck, twisting a bouquet from the stem.

  ‘I’ve been thinking about what we were talking about last time. About your illness,’ he says, voice quieter now as he spins the leaves with forefinger and thumb.

  ‘Yeah?’ she says, digging her nails into the soft flesh of a stalk to pull off a grouping of three leaves.

  ‘I don’t know if this is a strange question . . . but was there something you thought of that helped you back then, like a daydream you could disappear into? Like, I don’t know, a tropical beach somewhere, or a story you imagined yourself inside?’

  ‘A daydream . . .’ Is this not one now? she thinks as he looks at her, the air hazy with mint and the hot sun on the back of her neck. ‘When it was bad,’ she says, looking down at the topography of the patio stone, ‘there was nothing I could think of, I just blacked out. I went into nothingness.’

  ‘I suppose that’s the mind’s way of protecting us, forgetting past pain. Memory is a funny thing anyway. Sometimes we remember what we wish we didn’t and forget things we wish we hadn’t.’

  Her father’s shape appearing in the kitchen through the window draws their conversation to a close.

  ‘Here, I’ll take yours.’ Stuart holds out his hands.

  The three leaves are wilted and crushed by now but she still gives them to him, feeling the catch of his rough skin against hers, and then glancing up to see if her father noticed. But he’s busy with the corkscrew, his happy hum drifting through the door Stuart enters.

  ‘Oh, we’ve got you gardening already, have we? Got to earn your keep, I suppose,’ her father says in greeting.

  Maeve leaves the patio for the garden, not wanting her mood to be punctured. She takes the gate on the left wall and walks along the outside, reaching for the puffs of yellow flowers from overgrown weeds, feeling the hard ground underneath her feet. Once she’s through the natural archway between two banks of trees and bushes, she stops with her elbows on the splintery wood of the fence at the top of their field and looks across the valley. The roll of fields in the distance, in shades of yellow and green, the line of trees at the top of the far hill that hides the road, and the speck of other houses surrounded by their own greenery. The field they own slopes sharply down before her, more meadow than pasture, with the woods that cut through the middle of the valley beyond. Out there she wouldn’t be bothered, she thinks, wouldn’t have her mother keeping an eye on her, but Maeve hasn’t ventured much further than the garden yet.

  At dinner Maeve is sitting at a diagonal from Stuart. There are three couples this time, and the husbands of two of them work with her dad. One of them has brought along their nineteen-year-old daughter. Back from backpacking, they announced with warm pride, glancing at Maeve as if to check that their daughter does indeed look the most healthy, the best travelled. Still, as if to show Stuart that she isn’t a moody loner, Maeve asks the girl, whose name she didn’t catch, about Peru and the Nazca Lines, and listens politely to her answers. At one point the girl says, My parents said you’ve been ill, and the intonation of how she says that word makes Maeve want to grimace.

  Luckily, the girl is too busy enjoying the food – and intoning about its differences from that of South American cuisine to the table at large and the proud looks of her parents – to monopolize Maeve’s time. She can still luxuriate in watching Stuart while she sips the glass of white wine she accepted from her pleased father. Having rarely had crushes on anyone who wasn’t an actor or a singer, Maeve revels in the opportunity to study Stuart in person, to learn what he looks like from every angle. When he smiles his eyes get slightly hooded, and when he argues he often drops his gaze with some combination of bashfulness and sly confidence. She wonders if it’s this facial expression, the thick lashes on Stuart’s cheek looking almost feminine, that seems to rile the older man at the end of the table, or the way Stuart is so good at undercutting him while getting the rest of the table to laugh. Stuart has barely glanced at the backpacker and her bronzed skin, her blonde ponytail, and Maeve is viciously pleased. The backpacker can keep all the other men that are no doubt attracted to her, and she can have Stuart. Maeve has finished her glass of wine and, rarely having ever drunk alcohol, is admittedly a little tipsy.

  ‘There’s been a bit of a disaster with the meringue,’ her mother announces after the table has been cleared of the main course. Maeve hates the way
Ruth’s voice has taken on a higher pitched anxiety, that though her mother is so confident elsewhere, something about cooking seems to defeat her. ‘So if you’d like to have a wander round the garden while I try and remedy things?’

  The backpacker and her mother follow her into the kitchen to help, another wife goes to retrieve something from her car, one of the couples pours more wine and settles deeper into their chairs, and Alex leads two of the men to the shed to show off his newly inherited golf clubs. Stuart heads into the garden. Maeve follows him.

  It’s dusk again, and the outdoor light near the annexe must have been left on because there’s a glow above the right wall of the garden that spills yellow onto the dark leaves of the rhododendrons where she finds him, hands in pockets.

  ‘Ophelia,’ he greets her, his eyes dancing from flower to flower across her upper body.

  ‘I thought you would approve,’ she risks.

  ‘I do,’ he says, and tugs at the flounced hem of her top, his knuckles grazing her stomach.

  Chapter Eight

  ‘So,’ Nick says at dinner, pointing his glass of wine at Stuart, ‘what’s your story? What do you do?’ Nick is an old schoolfriend of Alex’s I haven’t met before because he rarely strays from the south-west. I knew the minute he arrived tonight that I disliked him. Something about the way his eyes studied me with a quick flick, something about the popped collar of his shirt and the way the ice-blue shade highlighted the ruddiness of his neck.