The Ophelia Girls

by Jane Healey

  ‘Those will kill you, you know.’

  My father died of lung cancer. When I saw Stuart at the funeral, a face from the past whose sudden reappearance felt only right in that church full of other faces from my family’s history, I had hugged him and breathed in the smell of tobacco and found it hard to let go, to take my face from his jacket. If he found the way I clung to him odd, he hadn’t said, only murmured, I’m so sorry, Ruth, so sorry.

  ‘Tell Alex that,’ he replies archly.

  ‘Oh, Alex knows how I feel about his smoking.’

  ‘But you forgive him anyway.’

  ‘Well, I married him, I’m kind of stuck with him.’

  ‘I envy you, you know,’ he says. ‘Your family, this house full of life.’

  ‘You could have that too, surely,’ I say, instead of saying, If you think my life is something to envy then you are quite mistaken.

  ‘I suppose.’ He clicks his lighter and a flame ignites and then dies, ignites and dies. ‘I just feel I’ve missed my chance.’

  ‘You haven’t. And you shouldn’t— You shouldn’t let memories of your mother stop you, shouldn’t think it would be the same,’ I say, perhaps too boldly. What do I really know about him now, seventeen years on?

  ‘Oh, I’m not sure that’s why. I think I’m just picky, I want to be swept off my feet.’ He smiles and I laugh.

  Alex enters the kitchen then, hair curling at the heat, mouth red with wine. ‘My two favourite people,’ he says. ‘What are you talking about?’

  ‘About the past,’ Stuart says, cutting a glance to me, ‘and bad fashion choices.’

  ‘Oh, Jesus,’ Alex says. ‘I wore that cape once in the seventies, and you’ve never let me live it down. Like you fared any better with your silly hair, Stuart.’

  ‘I never wore a cape,’ he retorts.

  ‘It was more of a jacket, really,’ Alex argues, running the tap and bending down to drink from it.

  What I remember most about the first time I met Alex, on the college lawn in the April sun, was his easy physicality, how comfortable he seemed in the world. A golden boy with a direct smile and a firm handshake. If I had only felt at home in the river, he felt at home everywhere.

  ‘You OK?’ he asks me as he puts an arm round my shoulder, kisses me on the cheek.

  ‘I’m fine,’ I say, wondering what Stuart sees when he looks at us, if we resemble a happy couple, if he can see the cracks.

  That night I dream of them, I dream of her, of Camille. We are in the river, and I am arranging her honey-brown hair over her shoulders as she watches me, the lip of the water moving up her chin and meeting her own lips as she smiles at me, as the petals of the bouquet she holds bob up and down with the movement of her floating body.

  How do I look? she asks.

  Perfect.

  Perfectly tragic? she says in that stilted way of hers. She tilts her head back; the water slips over her forehead and into her eyes before I catch her head and lift her to the surface again. She laughs and then looks sad. Her eyelashes are beaded gold in the sun; the frills of her dress tickle my legs.

  There, I say, stay just like that, and I wade backwards through the river, my feet slipping on unseen pebbles because I don’t want to look away from her.

  On the riverbank, I wipe my hands on the dry grass and pick up my camera as a breeze travels down the river towards us, lifting leaves, rippling the surface of the water. In the viewfinder I see her come into focus. I see the kick of her foot as she adjusts her position. I see her turn her head to look at me, her lips parting as if she is about to tell me something. I take the picture. With the click of the shutter, she disappears.

  Chapter Nine

  ‘Are you enjoying dinner?’ Stuart asks Maeve.

  Muted laughter sounds from the table near the house and then the garden quietens again, the breeze ruffling the plants around them, the creak of a tree branch shifting outside its walls. Maeve wonders how long they will have this time, imagines the bushes around them pushing out new shoots, leaves unfurling black in the dark and hiding them from anyone searching.

  ‘I’m enjoying the wine,’ she says.

  ‘I’m glad. You deserve to have fun, to be happy.’

  Do I? she thinks.

  ‘You’re frowning – you don’t think so?’

  She wishes he hadn’t taken his hand back, wishes he was still touching her. Her body feels too heavy to carry alone, too light to stand in place without floating away.

  ‘Have you ever slept out here, in the garden?’ he asks.

  ‘I don’t think I’ve slept outside anywhere.’

  ‘You should try it. You’d see the foxes and the cats and the other night-time creatures. Sometimes if you sleep outside, you’ll see things you won’t believe the next day, and you’ll wonder if they were a dream or not.’

  ‘Like what?’

  He looks down, rocks on his heels. ‘I saw a bride once, in Bosnia, just before dawn. She was dressed in white with a red waistcoat, a belt made of golden circles, and I saw her pick her lonely way through the rubble, the trail of her dress tattered, staring ahead as if she was sleepwalking. We were at someone’s house, sharing bottles of smuggled spirits, and I had gone out to the courtyard for air and lain down on a wall. But when I clambered out, she was gone.’

  ‘I lied earlier,’ Maeve says, swaying closer to him, feeling the fuzz of the wine like prickling dots in the dark air. ‘I do – I did have daydreams.’

  His hand cups her elbow; she feels the brush of his shirt.

  ‘But they’re stupid, childish things.’ I am a child, don’t blame me for that, she means. I am a child, you have to know that, don’t expect me to be a woman and worldly-wise. If you want me, want me for who I am right now.

  ‘You don’t have to tell me.’ A squeeze of her elbow.

  ‘But I want to,’ she says. ‘I used to – to imagine I was something like Sleeping Beauty, that I was only waiting. That someone would heal me with a touch and carry me out of there, carry me and never put me down. I prayed sometimes,’ she says, with an embarrassed puff of breath, ‘tried to make bargains with God, but it never worked. When I was younger, before I ever got ill, I used to wish I was some prince’s pampered pet, locked up in a tower.’

  ‘That’s not such a strange wish,’ he says, thumb circling a rose embroidered on her upper arm. ‘When I was a child and arguing with my mother’s boyfriends in our small flat, I used to dream of houses – cottages from fairy tales, huts in the wood, snowy palaces.’ He smiles at his past self. ‘And then, when I was abroad, it was art, paintings. I used to picture myself walking through a gallery, imagining myself stepping through the frames into the worlds beyond.’ He pauses. ‘Will you let me take your photo, Maeve?’

  ‘Yes.’ More sigh than word.

  ‘We could start Monday?’

  ‘Sure,’ she says, while her mind hums with that word, start, which promises more than an hour’s quick posing, that promises a project, of her and him and his camera alone.

  ‘I need to grab something from the annexe now but you should head back,’ he motions with his head, ‘before they declare you missing and send out a search party.’

  He doesn’t want them to walk back together and have it look suspicious, she thinks, just as she knows that neither of them are planning on telling her parents about the photos he wants to take of her.

  On Monday morning, she heads to meet Stuart in the field, so awkward in her body she feels like a jerking marionette, like he will take one look at her and say that he’s changed his mind. Yesterday he told her in passing that she should come just as she was, wear a dress maybe but whatever she felt comfortable in, and there was no need to do any make-up. She had nodded as if she had had her photo taken many times before, like, Sure, of course.

  Her mother is taking the twins to the village and her father is at work, and there’s no one to question her when she slips out of the house in a pale floral sundress.

  She sees him before h
e sees her, standing halfway down the hill looking towards the valley. The grass hasn’t been cut for years and is waist-high and flecked with yellow rattle, tall daisies and purple knapweed as she walks through in her sandals, feeling the dry blades of grass sharp on her bare legs, hearing the creak of hidden crickets.

  He waves when he turns round, and she concentrates so hard on walking towards him that she worries she’ll stumble. Once you start thinking about parts of your body – knees, feet, hips – it’s difficult to stop. Like when the scans had shown her blood was wrong inside her, like when the needles punctured her bones to get to the rotten marrow inside.

  ‘There you are,’ Stuart says, his eyes a little wide and his smile warm. He’s holding a bunch of the meadow flowers in his hand. ‘These are for you,’ he says, and she takes them from him as he opens up his camera bag.

  ‘Thank you,’ she says, mouth dry, pleased that she can busy herself with studying the flowers, touching their petals in between quick glances at Stuart’s face, brown in the sun, and his concentrated frown as he fiddles with the dials and the settings on his large black camera.

  ‘I thought we could start with this painting.’ He hands her a postcard with another Pre-Raphaelite image, a woman with wild brown hair wearing a white dress and lying down in a field with white and yellow meadow flowers around her, one arm swooning above her head. ‘Waterhouse’s Ophelia from 1889.’

  ‘It’s beautiful.’ She squints at the small face of the painted woman and wonders how she will match up to it.

  ‘I don’t want to do a straight copy, more of an “inspired by”,’ he says, ‘and besides, I think the colour of your hair will look better than hers.’

  His manner is more impersonal than it has been when they’ve talked in the garden but she can tell it’s because he’s in his working mode and she likes it, that he’s taking this seriously. That he’s not going to get her to pose for five minutes and then laugh it off.

  ‘How should I . . .’

  ‘I think we’ll start with you standing, with the valley and the hills in the background, and then depending on the light, I’ll get the slope of the field behind you next. Then we’ll try with you lying down. Is that all right? Sorry, I get quite a narrow focus when I’m working. You’ve never done this before, right?’

  ‘No.’ The last time a man photographed her, it was a nurse performing a chest X-ray as she stood shivering and vulnerable behind a screen.

  ‘That’s better, you’ll be a natural,’ he says, hand on her bare shoulder bringing a sudden prickle to her skin. ‘But tell me if you have any questions, or if you want to stop, or if you don’t feel comfortable.’

  ‘I don’t really know how to pose,’ she admits. Or what to do with her face.

  ‘Don’t worry, I’ll tell you exactly how I want you.’

  ‘And what if I do odd things with my face?’

  He laughs. ‘Don’t worry about that either, I’ll take a whole bunch, try and capture you in between the odd faces. I’ve got a lot of film to work through.’ He pats his bag and she thinks of how many film canisters he can fit inside it, of her tiny self repeated in a long line of negatives that spool around and around.

  He directs her to stand and then backs up a few steps to get the background into the shot. She bites her lip and then stops. She shifts on her feet and feels her shoulders swing, flexes her hand around the flowers. Hold your hair back, he says, and look over my shoulder. Good, he says, that’s good, hold the flowers loose at your hip. Now look to your right, further, there, and lift your chin, too much, there, that’s good. Hold that. She feels her eyes start to water with the sun. How are you doing? he asks. Fine, she says, turning towards him and shielding her eyes with her hand. Oh, that’s perfect, stay like that, he says, as she looks at him, staring at the lens of his camera with a shiver of daring, thinking about him staring at her from behind the camera, their eyes meeting with only the blink of the shutter between. Now, look to your left, hold your skirts with the same hand as the flowers, can you do that? he says. She nods without looking at him.

  There’s barely a breeze today; the bright heat of the sun and the yellowing grass makes her feel out of time again, as if she’s slipped into some other long summer. She thinks of that painting, of the girl who modelled for it. Who was she? What was she thinking as she posed for months and months and the painter studied her, watching her every small movement?

  Stuart walks a wide circle around her, changing the background of his shot, taking pictures of her from different angles as she feels her cheeks ache, her chin twitch. She wishes he’d tell her what her expression is supposed to be, direct her to smile or look serious. She worries that she’s only going to be frowning in these photos, squinting at the sun.

  ‘Do you need a break?’ he asks, coming closer as he loads a new film in his camera.

  ‘I’m fine. But if you need one?’

  ‘This is a holiday compared to dodging bullets or risking frostbite in my fingers in Moscow. You’re doing really well, Maeve, I know posing can be tiring. We’ll do the lying down ones now, I think.’

  ‘OK,’ she says, ‘here?’

  He nods and she awkwardly sinks to the ground, feeling the grass flatten around her and the hidden landscape of the earth underneath – dry beads of soil, small hummocks, the cool freshness of leaves hidden from the heat of the sun.

  ‘I want the grass to rise up around you, so it looks like it’s hiding you,’ he says as he crouches down at her side. She feels her limbs twitch, feels the strangeness of lying down in front of someone else that she always did when being ushered towards couches in doctors’ rooms.

  ‘I think it will look better without your sandals,’ he says, and she sits up to reach the buckle but it gets stuck beneath her fingers. ‘Here, I’ll help. Models shouldn’t be in charge of dressing themselves too, not when they’re sun-blind,’ he adds with a smile.

  She wants to make a noise, a gasp, when he lifts her foot onto his legs to untie her sandal, when she feels the warm grip of his hand around her ankle. She wonders whether he can see up her skirt where the hem rests on her knees.

  ‘There.’ He sets her bare feet back on the grass. ‘OK, so what I’m thinking this time, is for this hand to lie like this . . .’ She gives him her right hand and he places it at her side, curls her fingers inwards to make it look relaxed. ‘With the flowers on the ground nearby, and the other holding some of your hair over your head, like the painting, do you remember?’

  She does as she’s asked, and then he leans over to adjust strands of hair caught on her face as she feels a throb in her stomach. The ground is hard underneath her, the grass shifting with her minute movements, tickling her bare legs, her neck.

  ‘Perfect,’ he says, kneeling by her side, staring at her as she looks back.

  Right now, she feels viciously glad that he’s a photographer because she can’t think of any other situation where it would be possible for the two of them to spend so long looking at each other, to be crouched down in a hollow of grass, a meadow bower. To have his hands adjust her body and her dress, smooth a wrinkle from her waist, tug the hem slightly lower down her knees, brush a piece of hair away from her blinking eyes with a dry thumb.

  What does the camera see, what will it record? she thinks, as he moves around her with one hand adjusting the lens, stepping back and forward, standing up, crouching down, the cool shadow of his body morphing with his position. When he develops these photos, will he see how much she wants him, will he stop and think, I can’t do this again, I can’t lead her on, or will his eye be only artistic, will he see the shadows in a small patch of grass or the crook of her elbow and frown, ask her for a redo so he can fix the balance of colours and her proportion in the picture?

  Under his gaze and that of his camera, she’s thinking of herself as something beautiful, not as a medical specimen, or as a child in her parents’ family photos. She’s picturing what she looks like to him, seeing herself from the outside.


  ‘Right.’ He stands up with a groan and a press of his hand to his back. ‘I think I’ve got what I wanted to today.’

  ‘Yeah?’ She coughs at the pollen as she bends forward to buckle her sandals back on. It feels like hours have passed but also like the sun hasn’t moved at all.

  ‘You were great,’ he says. ‘Will you do this again, model for me?’

  ‘Yeah, sure,’ she says, trying to sound casual, trying not to sound like she’d do anything to do this again.

  ‘And we haven’t talked payment,’ he says with a teasing note, as he hoists his bag up on his shoulder. ‘I’ll think about that too.’

  The blood rushes to her head when she stands. ‘My going rate is a thousand an hour.’

  He laughs and then squints over her shoulder. ‘I guess if I deposit a cheque in your account someone might see that.’

  Her fingers twitch against the soft seed heads of the meadow as she tries to parse his tone. Is this photoshoot an inconsequential secret to keep for him, like he’s sneaked a beer to a teenage daughter of his friends at a party, or is it something more, something personal?

  ‘Maybe I’ll save it for your next birthday,’ he adds.

  Her next birthday. To be able to think of that, of getting older, living another year, feels dizzying. She doesn’t want to be a proper adult yet, responsible for herself. But maybe if she’s older, he will treat her differently, let himself think of her as more than a child.

  ‘I’ll take the flowers as a down payment for now.’ She’ll put them in water in her room, say she picked them herself.

  They start walking up through the field, long grass parting and closing behind them. Will the hollow where she lay this morning stay there, she thinks, or will the plants rise up towards the sun again and hide the impression of her body?

  ‘I’ll think of something,’ he says. ‘And of course we’ll need to find water at some point, to take a proper Ophelia portrait. You can swim, right?’