by Jane Healey
He shifts in his seat and her eyes glance over the familiar contours of his face. Sometimes, when her mother was her only company at the hospital, besides the doctors and nurses and the other kids, Maeve used to ache with longing for her father and his face and his arms around her. She said it sometimes when pain, or even boredom, made her cruel, said she’d rather have him here instead of Ruth. Once her mother flinched as if hit but the other times she only said, I know, darling, and stroked her hair back from her head or lifted a glass for her to drink.
‘I imagine it might be hard for you sometimes, the attention they need from us. But you know, when you were ill, they missed out on a lot too.’
‘I know that, I know.’
‘Of course you do.’ He puts his hand over her hand and now she can’t take hers back without it seeming weird. ‘Actually, your mother and I spoke to someone about it, family dynamics, getting things back to normal now that you’re well.’
Maeve feels a sudden rush of anger like the chill of a drip through her veins. ‘Why wasn’t I there for this conversation? I’m seventeen, I’m an adult.’
‘You’re right.’ He nods, looking down at his feet as he flexes them. ‘That’s what I wanted to talk to you about actually, you being an adult. University,’ he declares, with a pat of his thighs, ‘have you thought about what subject you’re interested in? There’s not long until you apply.’
I’m not one of your employees, Maeve thinks, stuck on the image of her parents talking to someone about how to handle her. Her father has always liked problems to be solved swiftly, for solutions to be found. Thus his difficulties with her illness, the way he seemed to find ways to keep busy, and sometimes avoided her eyes as if she didn’t fit in with what he wanted the world to be. ‘No, I haven’t.’
‘No ideas at all? You don’t have to decide about a career now, of course, unless it’s something like medicine, or sciences.’
The word ‘career’ makes her feel viscerally tired, like she wants to slump down right now and never get up again. Isn’t it enough that she’s alive, that she’s living and well? Picturing herself in an office somewhere is like picturing herself hiking a mountain; wearying, impossible.
‘I mean, you must have some idea about subjects you enjoy studying,’ he presses, looking at her as if she is being ridiculous. Perhaps she is.
‘All of them?’ she offers. ‘Except maths.’
‘There you go, the Humanities.’
‘What if I don’t go to university at all?’
‘Well, what else are you going to do?’ He has an open look on his face, is doing his best to hide his frustration with her.
Why don’t you ask the therapist you saw? she wants to reply, but her jaw aches with fatigue, her head too heavy on her neck for bitter comebacks. ‘I don’t know.’
‘That’s why university will be good, it’ll give you time to decide. And you’ll have fun, Maeve. God knows your mother and I did. You might even meet someone there.’
She picks at the edge of her thumbnail, drawing the sharp pain of a shard tugged from too far down. ‘Stuart was at your university too, wasn’t he?’
‘He was, probably one of my best friends there.’ Her father smiles. ‘We all lived together when we left halls.’
‘Is he the same as you remember?’
‘Yes, I think so. Maybe he’s less political, but we all are.’
‘Political?’
‘He went to all the protests, wrote letters, fundraised for radical groups, you know. He was good at it too, at getting people to understand. Sometimes I’d lose him at a party and find him holding court, talking about Ireland and Vietnam, about how we were the generation who could change things.’
‘Is he disappointed then, that you work in chemicals, that you used to work in oil?’
‘What? No, of course not. We grew up, like everyone does. And Labour are in power now, things are heading in the right direction.’
Her father had made them all stay up, her and the twins, to watch Blair be elected, to watch the landslide. What did I tell you, he had said, turning to Maeve, this year is a good year. As if her remission had been somehow connected to the political health of the country too.
‘Dad, why did we stop visiting Grandad? Why didn’t we ever come here after the twins were born?’
‘Did we not?’ His face is guileless but she doesn’t believe him. Why is it that he can question her about her plans for university but she can’t ask this one question about their family history?
‘No. Did you fall out with him?’
He touches his thumb to his jaw, finding the same patch of missed stubble he always does. ‘Your mum had a difficult relationship with him, he was a complicated man.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘You’ll need to ask her.’
Iza shrieks from somewhere else in the house.
‘So, you’ll think about it, university choices?’ her father says, standing up.
He’s in his summer uniform of large faded t-shirt with stretched-out collar and old shiny shorts, and she wants to tell him that he looks ridiculous. ‘Sure,’ she lies.
Maeve waits in the cool dark of the hall, sitting on the stairs, the carpet itchy under her thighs. Opposite her is a large mirror with a gold frame in which she studies her face, her flat expression, the nervous biting of her nails. The house is empty and feels emptier still but she doesn’t want to wait out front for him – there’s too little shelter with the long open lawn – and if she waited in the back garden he might not think to come and find her.
She should have brought her Discman, she thinks, looking at her pale legs in the mirror, but she doesn’t want to walk the few metres upstairs in case she misses him, in case her standing up breaks the spell.
There. The sound of a car.
She stands up too quickly, feels the rush of blood, her reflection darkening so she can’t do one final check.
She’s at the front door as Stuart emerges from his car, camera bag on his shoulder, battered leather holdall in one hand and folder tucked in the other.
He smiles when he sees her. ‘I got the photos back. Do you want to come see them?’ He motions his head towards the old dairy courtyard and the annexe.
‘Yeah,’ she says, stepping out onto the gravel with bare feet, feeling the bite of each stone.
He glances at her feet. ‘I would carry you, but my arms are sort of full right now.’
‘That’s OK.’
‘It’s amazing the amount of stuff I manage to carry with me for one trip to the home counties, when I managed with nothing but my camera abroad,’ he groans at the door to the annexe, fumbling for his key.
She has the brief thought that she should offer to get it out of his pocket for him, and then imagines the opposite, of him sliding his hand into any of the pockets of her shorts.
‘After you,’ he says and she brushes past him, feeling the bulk of his bag against her side, smelling his aftershave. ‘Can I get you some tea?’ he asks, as he sets down his things and turns on the kettle.
‘I don’t drink it.’ Her hands hover on one of the mismatched chairs at the round table serving as dining table and workspace both. She’s trying not to study the space, to note his belongings, trying to act casual with being a guest in a room where the bed he sleeps on, and its ruffled sheets, are only a few steps away.
He leans back against the sideboard and crosses his arms. ‘No tea? Your mother has raised a heathen.’
‘Too bitter.’
‘I’ll have to get hot chocolate for next time, the good stuff with cream. In the meantime,’ he says, as the kettle boils and he makes his cup with practised ease, ‘the photos.’
He sets his tea on the table to one side of her and then places an envelope on the table to her other side, shoulder brushing against hers. His hand rests on top of the envelope. ‘Ready?’ he asks.
She turns to look at him. He’s close enough that she can see the texture of his skin, the wrinkles around
his eyes. ‘Are you pleased with them?’
‘I am, yes. Here.’ He opens the envelope and fans the photos out on the chipped polish of the table.
Her eyes can’t focus immediately; she sees a wash of flaxen grass-green, a splash of cream, her dress, then the red of her hair, and then, as she picks one up, her face. She inhales sharply, feels her eyes smart. She knows he’s looking at her but she can’t look at him, embarrassed about how much it means to her to look like this. Beautiful. Beautiful and sad and sullen, hopeful, wanting, languid. He seems to have caught so much, even in the ones where he’s furthest away, where she is shading her face with her hand.
‘Verdict?’ he asks, voice soft, reaching across her to take his tea.
‘Amazing,’ she says and touches his arm. ‘Thank you.’
‘I should be the one thanking you, Maeve.’ He picks up a few of the photos to show her, commenting on what he likes about the light, or the shapes of the grass and her body in its hollow, the colour of her hair.
She didn’t remember baring so much skin but her legs and arms seem to merge with the pale dress. There is a vulnerability to her in these images, she sees, and thus an innate feeling of trust towards the photographer, towards him. Noticing that now makes those feelings stronger.
‘I know we were going for Ophelia, but I think some of these look more Persephone,’ he says. ‘You know the myth?’
She nods.
He slides the photos around. ‘I’m still surprised at what a camera can pick up that the eye doesn’t. Something can be beautiful in real life but the lens transforms it into something more, gives it meaning.’ He holds up a photo in which her face fills half the image, the focus fuzzy around the edges, blades of grass softening her jaw, hair curling across her forehead as her head lolls to the side. ‘There’s something ancient about your expression here.’
‘Are you saying I look old?’
The children in the hospital looked old, especially the sickest ones, like little wizened gods who have seen the world’s horrors, Georgia said once, shivering like they gave her the creeps.
‘Your expression, not your face or your eyes,’ he drawls, ‘I don’t see any cataracts, any clouding in those baby-blues of yours.’
‘You’re the one with the blue eyes.’
Holding his gaze is unbearable, but in a good way, like jumping on a swing seat made boiling hot by the sun.
‘I stand corrected,’ he says, ‘your eyes aren’t blue, they’re greeny blue, they’re cyan, teal.’
‘Those are all different colours.’
‘Well, I’ll have to study them closer.’
Stuart’s eyes are always blue – blue like the bottom of a deep swimming pool.
‘So, I had an idea for our next shoot. Come here, let’s sit down.’
She follows him to the old corduroy sofa below the skylight, settles by one of the armrests.
‘Do I smell bad or something?’
‘Well, you have been driving all day.’
He laughs, and she turns her hips towards him and puts her legs up on the seat, feet awkwardly hanging off the edge. He clasps her ankles, puts her heels on his thighs. She’s wearing shorts today and spent a long time in the shower making sure her legs were perfectly smooth.
He keeps a hand on her ankle as he retrieves his tea from the floor.
‘What’s your idea then?’ she asks, to cover up the twitch of her leg.
‘Have you been out back?’ he nods. ‘In that overgrown patch. I found a bath there, of all things. It’s a little weather-worn and full of soil, but I’m going to clean it up today. I want to riff off the origin of Millais’ Ophelia, how Lizzie Siddal lay in a bath while he drew studies of her. Did you hear that story?’
‘She caught pneumonia,’ Maeve says, remembering what the guide had told her in the Tate gallery. ‘Pneumonia is what I almost died from.’
‘Oh, shit, I didn’t know. We’ll do something else.’
‘No, it’ll be fine. I mean, it’s a viral infection, you don’t get it because you’re cold.’
He squeezes her foot. ‘I’ll fill it with warm water.’
She wants to go there now, wants to slip under the water to cool her face, wants to lie back with her head on the lip of the bath as the sun beats down on her.
‘I’ll need to pick up some more flowers too, I can’t rip up your whole garden.’
‘Friday?’ she offers. ‘My mum’s taking the twins to a fair all day.’
‘That sounds perfect. Do you mind if I smoke in here? I’m lazy.’
‘Sure,’ she shrugs, feeling her legs lift up as he retrieves the pack from his back pocket.
He watches her as he lights one. ‘You looked upset when I got back today, is everything all right?’
She scrapes a fingernail down a groove of corduroy. ‘It’s just my dad, he’s been stressing me out about university.’
‘Why? You won’t be applying until the winter, will you?’
‘Yeah, I know, but he wants me to choose a subject.’ She drops her head on the back of the sofa, breathes a heavy sigh. She wonders if Stuart’s eyes are roaming her body while she’s not looking.
‘I would have assumed you’d have a gap year or something,’ he says, thumb pressing into the arch of her foot. ‘Although maybe not an expedition to Peru like Miss Adventurer.’
She snorts, lifts her head again.
‘But you still need to rest and recover, surely.’ He leans over to tap his cigarette into his mug and she sees the black band of his boxers above his jeans.
‘What would I do for a year?’ she asks, flexing her foot in his hand. She hasn’t put nail varnish on this summer but she doesn’t care now.
He shrugs. ‘Interrail, visit Italy, stay in a tiny room in a picturesque loggia, tour the galleries. Stay here, read books, take photos, expand your musical education beyond the Spice Girls—’
She kicks him. ‘I don’t like the Spice Girls.’
‘OK, then. But really, you can do anything. You don’t have to do anything either, just rest and see what comes your way. If you don’t know what you’re interested in yet then what’s the point in applying for university?’
‘That’s what I thought. What did you study?’
‘PPE.’
‘Not law?’
‘No, I changed my mind.’ He stubs the cigarette out. ‘I’m not sure I’ve used any of it since though, except to impress those who tried to underestimate me. Saying you went to Oxbridge is a good passport sometimes when trying to gain an audience with a despot or hitch a ride on a helicopter, but I could have lied all the same.’
‘Did you always want to be a photographer?’ she asks, and then reaches to pick up a small squat book on a pile, which says The Photography Book. Underneath it is a similar-sized volume called The Art Book.
‘Those two were actually gag gifts, but it turns out it’s rather useful to have the entirety of western art history at your fingertips for quick reference. When I was a boy, sometimes I used to see paintings in black-and-white reproductions before I ever saw them in colour. You want to borrow them?’
‘Yes, please,’ she says, hoping to have something of Stuart’s to keep her company in the hours she’s apart from him.
‘So polite,’ he teases.
‘I should probably get back to the house.’
‘Do your parents keep tabs on you?’ he asks, circling her anklebone with his thumb.
‘Not as much as they used to. I guess they want me to be a normal teenager now.’ She feels awkward saying that word, but then she’s decided she’s not going to lie and try to pretend she’s older for him.
‘Drink and drugs and all that?’
And sex, she fills in, in her head. ‘Is that what you were like?’
‘Do your parents ever talk about their university days?’
‘Not really.’
‘They ever tell you they smoked weed sometimes?’
‘No.’ She feels a sudden rising of anxiety. There�
�s something unnerving about discovering the secret pasts of your parents, perhaps because it means you don’t know them at all, or because it reminds you that their existence isn’t reliant on you as yours is on them.
‘I suppose parents don’t share that kind of stuff because they don’t want to be a bad influence. You won’t tell them I told you, will you?’
‘Of course not.’
He slides her feet off his lap so they can stand up.
‘Can I have one of the photos?’ she asks. ‘I’ll keep it safe.’ I’ll hide it, is what she means.
‘Be my guest. I’m curious to see which one you’ll choose,’ he says, rounding the table as she leans over it.
She can feel his body behind her even though he isn’t touching her, and her back spasms. ‘This one,’ she says.
‘I like that one too.’
She holds it up and it catches the light. A swooning girl with a floral bouquet abandoned at her side; the dark shadow of a photographer almost touching her feet. Persephone waiting for her Hades.
Chapter Twelve
Joan’s mother didn’t want her to go to the river any more. She had seen the photos, Joan told us early one morning as we walked down through the fields, sharing a sticky stack of toast and marmalade that Sarah, as the self-proclaimed mother of the group, had brought with her so we wouldn’t starve.
‘She thought it was morbid,’ Joan said, with a kick at a clump of grass, ‘to keep doing it, to keep drowning.’
‘So what did you say?’
‘I asked her if she would prefer me spending time with the boys and getting into trouble.’
‘Do you have a boyfriend back home?’ I asked.
‘No.’ She shrugged and then looked puckish. ‘But Linda does.’
‘You’ve kept that quiet,’ Sarah teased.
‘It’s nothing serious,’ Linda said with a flick of her hair. The ends were frizzled from the sun, and she would scratch them together and complain how dry they were before slathering on conditioner that she washed out in the river.
‘But you have, you know, right?’ Sarah asked, as we entered the dappled shade of the woods.
‘What?’
‘Don’t play dumb.’ Joan rolled her eyes.