The Ophelia Girls

by Jane Healey

  We used to have cultured friends, I think, as Nick and his wife talk of their latest holiday – the size of the pool, the tennis provision, anecdotes about various disasters at the buffet. At university we talked about politics and art and philosophy; in London our friends were pooled from many different walks of life; but now I seem to have emerged from a decade’s childcare into a world I don’t recognize. Or is it just the meanness of the white wine talking? Because surely out of everyone tonight, I might have the most boring topics of conversation at my disposal – how to wash jam stains out of children’s socks, for instance, or how to clean mould from bathroom walls, how to muster up a fancy-dress costume out of an old sheet. Stuart is the only interesting one here, the one whose company I want.

  ‘I’m a photographer,’ he answers Nick.

  ‘Oh,’ Nick says, with a rounding of his mouth.

  ‘A celebrated war photographer, actually,’ Alex corrects. I try to catch his eye, see if he is as bored as I am by Nick, but he’s looking at Stuart.

  ‘I wouldn’t have pegged you for that,’ Nick says.

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Well, you look normal.’

  ‘Normal?’

  ‘It just seems a little ghoulish, that’s all, standing at the sidelines of all that death and famine. Observing from a distance.’

  ‘And how do you think the civilized western world hears of wars, Nick?’

  ‘Touché,’ he replies.

  ‘He does art photography now – is that what they call it, Stuart?’ Alex says. ‘And fashion photography, editorials.’

  ‘Fashion photography, that sounds glamorous,’ one of the wives says, adjusting the large pendant of her necklace.

  ‘It certainly pays well,’ Stuart says.

  ‘What do you think about the problems with it? With the glorification of anorexia and heroin chic?’ Nick’s daughter, the bronzed backpacker, asks with scholarly concern.

  ‘What do you think about it?’ Stuart asks.

  ‘I think it’s wrong, obviously. That sickness is supposed to be glamorous, that heroin is. I saw the devastation of the drug trade on my travels and I can’t see how a fashion magazine could condone that, I think it’s sick.’

  ‘You visited the Colombian cocaine fields? Wow, that’s definitely off the beaten track,’ Stuart says.

  Oh dear, I think.

  ‘No, I mean, I saw the knock-on effects,’ the girl backtracks.

  ‘As for the glorification of sickness, of pain, of suffering,’ Stuart says, tilting the bottle of white wine, rubbing a thumb over the condensation, ‘I don’t know about glorification, but I don’t see why images of those things can’t be beautiful in a dark kind of way. My images of war have graced gallery walls. Dead bodies, blown-up buildings. Someone still calls them art.’

  ‘I rest my case,’ Nick says with a hearty laugh.

  Stuart smiles as he picks at the wine label.

  ‘Can you pass the bread?’ one of the men asks, and I watch as his wife returns the heated look Nick throws at her.

  Suddenly I am remembering another dinner party twenty-four years ago. The families summering at the cottages, the Ophelia girls among them, and the wasps circling the three tables shoved together underneath the chestnut tree, the younger children playing on a plaid rug and the air thick with smoke.

  I say dinner party, but it was in the afternoon with the sun still blazing – a late lunch, an early dinner; as the summer went on the normal strictures melted away. Children left to get sticky and hungry and flushed with sun; mothers giving up on bras, on make-up and shoes; fathers growing out patchy beards and waving around thick joints as early as breakfast. The fathers were all teachers from London or the commuter belt and the mothers were housewives or teachers too; the owner of the cottages liked to advertise to schools so he could hire them out for the whole six weeks, and so they were all mostly liberal, but not so liberal as to not sneer at hippies, while doing their best, I thought then, to take on all their affectations.

  I remember that meal because it was when the flirting of some of the parents went beyond what the children might expect to grin and bear. When, four wine bottles down as the light lengthened, Joan’s mother sat herself on Sarah’s father’s lap and kissed his bristly cheek, and when Joan’s father asked which woman he would have in compensation and Linda’s mother sauntered around the table and kissed him full on the mouth to cheers and rounds of applause, sitting back with a flush and an arch of her back that made him whisper something in her ear and her smile grow rich and pleased.

  We left them then, the Ophelia girls and the three teenage boys, who peeled off to the fields with a bottle of wine when Joan told them not to follow us to the woods with a viciousness that brooked no argument.

  There was no argument between us girls about which one would enter the water first either, as Joan fumbled down the bank and sank right under the surface, the bubbles of her furious breaths – her screams? – emerging before her head did.

  ‘Well, go on then,’ she said to us, her jaw tight, silver water caught in her collarbones, ‘take a photo.’

  I handed the camera to Camille who did as asked, crouching on the bank as Joan sculled her hands, her feet sometimes kicking sharply as if knocking away weeds, her harsh breath visible even with the ripple of the water around her. She tipped her head back, groaned at the sky, and then turned onto her front and floated, and I heard the shutter click as Camille took a photo of that too. An inversion of the classical paintings of Ophelia, a drowning girl refusing to show her face in all its loveliness to the camera, her jeans and blouse plastered dark to her skin as she lay motionless.

  ‘All right,’ Joan said, when she had turned onto her back again, panting. She stood up and her blouse made a sucking noise that made her grimace. ‘Jesus.’ She clambered onto dry land. ‘I’m not doing this in jeans again.’

  The jeans had been tight before they got wet, and when she struggled to get them off, Linda and I took a leg each, peeled them off her chilled blue limbs as she wriggled around on the ground, bellowing and complaining. And then she was free; her white knickers gone see-through, her blouse tugged over her head too as I looked away from her braless top half in a flush of embarrassment. We had all seen each other half naked by now, but I still found it hard to know where to look. Presumably, I thought, because I hadn’t grown up with any mother or sisters.

  She lay out in the sun, her eyes closed. ‘If I catch them fucking,’ she said, the word sounding obscene in her mouth, ‘or if she forgets to take her pill . . .’ She shook her head like her ears were blocked with water.

  ‘At their age,’ Linda remarked, with a jaded knowingness and a sighing stretch of her arms. ‘My mother’s done it before though, slept with other men. She thinks we’re best friends and she can tell me everything, like I’d be happy that she’s sleeping with the P.E. teacher. Like she and I are on one side against my father. Well, when I leave for uni she’s on her own. She can come up with her own lies.’

  ‘It’s bacchanalian,’ Camille said then. She was plaiting stems of flowers together in her lap. ‘The wine and the heat. All they need now is some animal sacrifice.’

  ‘I wouldn’t put it past them,’ Joan said.

  The light was growing yellow with the waning day, the river mostly shadowed by the trees. Sarah had been quiet, and the four of us kept glancing over to her and then at each other.

  ‘You want to go in next, Sarah?’ Linda asked.

  ‘Sure,’ she said, brushing dust off the blue skirt of her dress and looking carefully at the ground as each footstep brought her closer to the river’s edge. She gasped when she entered and it sounded like the beginning of a cry, but when she turned back to look at us, she was smiling. She shivered at the chill of the water and then waded out further. She had a large patterned shawl around her shoulders, and as she dipped down and splayed back in the water, it spread out like a blanket between her and the hard stones of the riverbed.

  I came closer to
take her picture, sitting on the bank, my own feet submerged in the tug of the current, the slip of mossy weeds stroking past.

  When she turned her head to look at me, her smile had faded. She stroked her hands through the water, picked a strand of hair out of her mouth, and kept staring. As I adjusted the lens, I felt the weight of trying to record her as she was, beautiful, sad, aching; of trying to capture what she was trying to say, words that could not be spoken or heard or understood.

  Soon it was too dark for my camera, the water of the river darker still, the bluish light of dusk around us.

  ‘We’ll have to bring candles next time,’ one girl said.

  ‘Have our own bacchanal,’ Linda added, nodding at Camille.

  By some unspoken invitation, we stripped to our knickers and entered the river together, swimming and floating, grasping onto each other’s legs and arms, kicking against the pebbles of the riverbed. There was something so thrilling about it, our bodies there in the dark together, the shriek of fear at the touch of another person’s fingers on your side and then the shiver of pleasure when that same hand smoothed down a shoulder in apology. You had to be close to see anyone’s face, had to tread water or hook your legs around hers to try and catch the shape of a mouth moving, the glint of moonlight on dark eyes, as you said something that seemed vital at the time.

  ‘It’s like this,’ Sarah began.

  ‘What if there’s a creature in here with us?’ Linda joked.

  ‘Is it even water, what we’re swimming in, and how would we know?’

  Sarah, clasping my hand, ‘I think this is what witches did, all those tales of secret rites in the woods.’

  When we lay exhausted on our backs and stared at the sky through the willow trees, we could see one or two stars, could hear the night’s breeze flee through the woods towards us.

  ‘How long do you think it would take for someone to come looking for us if we stayed here forever?’ Camille wondered out loud, as I floated next to her.

  ‘Weeks,’ Sarah said. ‘Or until my mum gets sick of looking after my siblings and wants me to take over.’

  ‘I know how to make a shelter with wood and leaves, I learned it in a book,’ Camille offered.

  ‘Of course you did,’ Linda said.

  While the other girls usually sunbathed on the riverbank, tipping their faces to the sky, Camille always lay on her front, reading one of her books, her hair a curtain shielding her eyes from the summer light.

  ‘I can hunt,’ Sarah said. ‘Well, make traps for foxes.’

  ‘And we can drink the river, it’s freshwater,’ I said.

  ‘Well, there you are then. We can stay here all summer,’ Joan declared. ‘Our own little witchy commune.’

  But it was too cold to stay in the river and too cold to stay on its banks with our chilled limbs and cotton dresses. So, eventually, we made our way through the quiet woods and then up through the fields with the moon to guide our way.

  Two days later our second lot of developed photos arrived, five whole rolls of them, and we gathered under the tree on my front lawn to look through them.

  Some of the photos weren’t focused right, or the light reflecting off the river had been too bright, and in those it was hard to tell the identity of the girl, faces and bodies a smudge of silvery yellow, the banks and the trees a whirl of green and brown and orange.

  But the ones where you could see details – the shape of a lifted hand, parted lips, toes emerging from the surface, the swirl of a dress floating around its wearer, sad eyes looking back at the viewer – were beautiful. They made my chest ache, made me want to cry.

  ‘We need to get serious about this,’ Joan said with a bossiness we didn’t mind, once we had all taken our turns looking through the photos, passing them gingerly by their edges as if our fingertips might blur the ink. At dinner the night before, Joan’s mother and Sarah’s father had continued their flirting, had gone off giggling together and emerged rumpled from the garden, and we could sense Joan’s need for control of this at least, for a concentrated distraction. ‘We need better dresses and clothes. Better flowers.’

  ‘There’s a jumble sale at the village church today,’ I said.

  ‘And my mum brought her sewing machine with her,’ Sarah said, resting her head on her arms, looking peaceful like a dozing cat in the sun.

  ‘I could probably find some of my mother’s old dresses.’

  ‘And my dad has some Shakespeare stuff, programmes and books with him. If we’re doing Ophelia properly.’

  ‘What about the library, for art books?’ Camille suggested.

  ‘I’ll go with you and carry them back,’ I offered. ‘We can go this afternoon.’ There was something intriguing about Camille. I told myself it was only that she was so quiet, that I already knew so much about the other girls compared to her and wanted to balance things out.

  She smiled. There was a graze on her knee from when she had tripped over a root in the woods in the dark yesterday, landing on the hard ground with a punched-out breath.

  ‘As for the flowers,’ Linda said, ‘maybe I’ll steal a few more from gardens. Or beg some from the florist. How much do flowers cost anyway?’

  She looked at me. We didn’t talk about money much at the river, or our families’ wealth, but still I was aware that while the other parents were on well-earned holidays in small cottages that had once been for the estate’s workers, I was a daughter of the big house.

  ‘I’ve never bought any. I have some pocket money to spare though, I’ll get some today. I mean, not lots, but some,’ I said, voice stumbling as I tried not to be awkward.

  ‘Or you could just ask the gardener’s son,’ Joan said as we watched Stuart come past, his arms full of newspapers and books and his battered leather journal as he left my house. ‘You know he’s in love with you.’

  ‘He is not,’ I said, and then he looked up at us, at me, and waved, and I waved back as Linda sniggered.

  ‘Hullo, Loverboy!’ Joan shouted out as I grabbed the sleeve of her top.

  ‘Hi girls,’ he called, sweeping his curls from his face as the others poked me and I swatted them away, rolling my eyes.

  Now, back in the present, as I clean up the mess from the pavlova that took forty-five minutes longer to make than it should have, I watch Stuart make his way inside from the dining table, carrying an armful of plates.

  ‘Alex can still pick ’em, can’t he?’ he says, lifting an eyebrow.

  It had been a running joke between Stuart and me that Alex had terrible taste in friends, because he was forever turning up at college parties with the most boring young men from his sports clubs and maths tutorials. If I have terrible taste in friends then you two are included in that, he retorted when we told him once, laughing drunkenly around a narrow table in a student pub. We’re the exception, Stuart had declared, smacking a kiss on his cheek. Alex liked Stuart because he pushed him out of his staid comfort zone – encouraging him to climb the roof of the chapel at 3 a.m. one night or signing the both of them up to be in a raucous college pantomime – and I think I probably liked Stuart because I trusted him more than the other boys, or girls at that. Having him here for the summer is one bright spot of being back in this house.

  ‘You sure I can’t do that for you?’ Stuart offers, as I scrape a spoon along some of the unfamiliar fine china I unearthed last week from the back of a cupboard, still in its original box and aged tissue paper.

  ‘You know, I think this is my parents’ wedding crockery,’ I say, realizing only now and setting the plate down. ‘I thought it was just one of Dad’s antique collections. That he might roll in his grave to see me use it instead of preserving it. And for what? What’s the point of all these old things you can’t use, that he didn’t even display?’ I wipe the back of a soapy hand across my forehead.

  ‘Let me do the others.’ He nudges me out of the way and rinses the next plate, as I rest a hip against the counter.

  I pull the last piece of meringue o
ff the cooking tray before he dunks it in water. It’s so chewy it hurts my jaw. ‘I think my mother would have been a better hostess than me,’ I say. ‘I just have this mental picture of her in pearls and full skirts with a perfect hostess smile.’

  ‘You never used to talk about her, your mother.’

  ‘I didn’t really have anything to say. I know so little about her, really.’

  The fact of her death eclipses all the other meagre things I might have ferreted out of those who knew her. Her death leaving me alone, tiny and vulnerable, on the same day she brought me into the world. It spooks me to think of it, to not know, after so many years of estrangement and coldness before that, quite how to imagine my infanthood, my father holding me as a baby. And if I think of my mother I feel either a low hum of grief, or a nothingness that then turns to a queasiness, as if I judge myself for not remembering her with great emotion. Would I have been happier if I had grown up with a mother, would I have made fewer mistakes?

  ‘My mum had all the makings of a great hostess,’ Stuart says, wiping his hands on his jeans. ‘She was a good cook. She could rustle up a gourmet feast from three squashed tomatoes and a hard loaf. She made friends easily, she loved a party, she was beautiful.’ He looks down as he takes out his pack of cigarettes and lighter. He still has those long lashes, Stuart, the ones any girl would have died for.

  ‘Can you not smoke inside, please? And I wish I could have met her.’ His mother had died in his first year of university. I was in my last year of school, and I can’t remember if I sent him a letter, or if we talked on the phone about it.

  ‘You would have liked her, everyone did, even when she was a drunken mess. But they didn’t have to clear up after her, to wrestle her out of her vomit-soaked clothes and put her to bed.’ He sighs. ‘When she had friends round for dinner she would put on a record and dance around, and I’d watch her do her make-up in the mirror and sing along and she’d say, I’ll just have one glass now to get me warm, but one glass always turned into two and three and four, and she’d be on the floor by the time the guests arrived, and I had to finish the cooking and open the door for them. Tasha’s little helper, they’d call me, and ruffle my hair.’ He puts a cigarette in the corner of his mouth.