by Jane Healey
‘The owners are occupied elsewhere today, but you informed us that you’d like to do the other pictures first,’ the woman says.
‘Yes, I’ll do the house and get started with the staff today. You’ve told them about the project, yes? Handed out release forms?’
‘I have.’ The woman looks politely uncertain. ‘And—’ The woman looks between Maeve and Stuart.
‘Oh,’ Stuart says, clasping her shoulder. ‘I brought my daughter along for the day, is that all right? Just to watch.’
‘That’s fine.’ The woman smiles as Maeve freezes, holding her skirt down even though there isn’t a hint of breeze.
The heat, and the lie, the unfamiliar setting, reminds her suddenly of being on holiday, of the feeling that you have slipped sideways out of your life into another one, that all the normal rules have melted like ice cream in the sun, and soon the flagstones around the swimming pool will be so hot you’ll have to make a burning run for it.
His daughter, she thinks, as they are led off and the woman glances back at them, is that what they look like? Any normal person would have corrected him, would be biding their time to tell him off, but Maeve isn’t. Maybe it’s the punishing heat of the day that seems to flatten any impulse to be indignant. Or maybe she is coming to like the way Stuart presses against the boundaries of right and wrong, how he folds her into his worlds of make-believe. She can be Ophelia or Persephone for him, his teenage lover, his daughter.
If Stuart owned this house, she imagines, as they slip inside the cool marble-floored hallway, past bronze lamps and antique umbrella stands, towards the stairs carpeted a lush red, she might have been his ward. She would be given a velveted tower all her own with a schoolroom, and in her seventeenth year she would be brought to him by her tutor on a hot summer’s day in a froth of white and tightly laced boots to be told that she was promised to marry him, silly little fool that she was, and she would swoon, overcome with a snarl of so many emotions, of horror and trembling hope, Maeve thinks, as she clutches the polished banister and tips her head back.
She looks up to see Stuart standing at the top of the stairs with his camera, and the two versions of her – real and imaginary – seem to shimmer as he takes a quick photo of the grand staircase, and of her, before dropping the camera around his neck and turning back to their guide, and her crisp vowels and kitten heels.
Chapter Twenty
This morning I woke gasping for water, not air, choking on a hot, dry cough. It was late and I could hear Alex downstairs picking up his keys, putting on his shoes, the quiet snick of the front door closing behind him and then his car up the drive.
After Maeve and Stuart leave, I feel out of sorts. The twins wave away my offer to take them for a walk, or play a board game together, and when I sit down on the sofa in the living room they turn around – with one of those synchronized twin-movements that make your eyes feel like they’ve glitched – to tell me that they want to play alone, that I’m ruining their game.
It’s the heat, I tell myself; that’s why I have a headache, why I feel like a visitor in someone else’s home. I take out the post, the bills and paperwork, trying to make sense of the detritus of my father’s life, of the bills we have to pay. The sink and the water glass I left by it feel too far away from my seat at the kitchen table so I sit and sweat, letting my lips go dry, my headache worsen. I know what Alex’s base salary is but not what his bonus might be this year, if he gets one at all, and it’s hard to compare energy bills from the past, when my father was the only permanent resident, to a wasteful family of five. Every time I try and make a budget, like the ones we kept to so strictly in London, I seem to add more and more expenses, my handwriting becoming smaller as though, if I could keep the list on only one page, the cost will be less too: new school uniforms for the three of them, stationery, sports clothes, all the extra classes that add up, the dentist, the two cars, the train season ticket, groceries, toiletries, insurance; the house – the oil for the Aga, the gas for the heating, the electricity, the pipes and the water, the ivy digging into the walls, the rotten windows, the roof—
Oh, to be a girl again, I think. To have no responsibilities except to dream, to brush your hair, to do your homework now and then.
I’ve picked up one of Iza’s discarded crayons and am shading in the bottom of a piece of paper I realize belatedly is the drawing I made of Stuart. I drag it out from under my pile of paperwork.
Is there any talent to be found in it? I reach to pick up the red crayon and rest the point of it hard against the paper, near the line of his leg against the bench, thinking about scribbling in the whole thing, erasing it like a frustrated child. But it’s the only art I’ve made in twenty-four years.
I’ve shaded the bottom blue and green now, a child’s impression of an expanse of water. I feel embarrassed as I take up my HB pencil and sketch a tiny figure of a girl standing in it, the water up to her thighs. It’s easy to draw a dress, easier than drawing a man sitting on a bench with one leg crossed over the other, just a soft A-shape and floaty sleeves like elongated bells. I twiddle the end of my pencil to make flowers, dot the fabric with purple and yellow crayon points, the wax residue giving it texture. Faces are the hardest part, like Stuart’s above; a wonky nose, the jaw out of alignment, shading instead of eyes because I lost my nerve. I draw the girl’s hair instead, long and to one side, as if there’s a wind blowing through her. Orange and then shaded with brown to make it look less like Pippi Longstocking. But now I’ve gone too far and it looks auburn, hazel, the colour of brown hair under dappled summer sun.
*
Another drunken afternoon at the river, or was it the same afternoon as the one with gin and orangeade? It’s difficult to pin the days down, impossible to say which picture of us was taken on which day, or sometimes which girl was in the picture; we shared dresses, flowers, ribbons tied around our waists, we shared the river.
Linda was singing a folk song she had learned for an exam, something about a man lying in his bed on a windy night and the sound of his lover knocking on the window. Joan was making small plaits in Camille’s hair, and Sarah and I were looking through a stack of Polaroids. The film had run out and there wouldn’t be time to get another one this summer. It felt like things were all coming to an end, that I could already feel the cold breath of autumn, that the dry leaves on the trees were twitching, ready to fall.
‘Do we have enough?’ I asked Sarah. By which I meant, were these pictures enough to last us until next summer, or some future point when we were no longer girls and needed to look at them to know how lovely we once were. ‘Do you think we achieved what we set out to do?’
‘You’re a perfectionist,’ she replied, laying out a top row of pictures, close-ups: white fabric billowing in the water, hands curled in the cold of it, petals flecking the surface, flashes of pale skin and wet hair stuck to cheeks and chin. ‘We started the summer with nothing and look at what we made.’
‘How are we going to divide them?’ Linda asked, stopping her song, her voice out of breath.
‘What do you mean?’ Sarah replied.
‘I mean, who takes which ones home with them?’
‘Hasn’t the summer only just started?’ Camille said plaintively.
‘We’ve still got time,’ I said to the group, but I meant it as a reply to Camille.
‘We’ve only got a week,’ Linda said, passing her cigarette to Joan and sliding her orange sunglasses back up her nose with the jaded insouciance of someone who has had many a teenage summer.
‘School,’ Joan said mournfully, ‘and boys.’
‘Like you’re not dying for male company,’ Linda said. ‘You’re fizzing with frustration.’
‘I’m fine with the sisterhood, thank you very much.’
I raked my hand in the grass to my side and focused on the photo in the corner, one I had taken of Sarah on dry land, her hands clutched in the skirt of her dress, water dripping from her bare legs onto the earth. A week was no
t enough. I looked up to see Camille watching me from beneath her fringe, the bruise on her jaw still the same. I looked back down and flushed.
‘I just think you’ve got to be realistic about things coming to an end,’ Linda said.
‘Who died and made you our mother?’ Joan replied. There was anger simmering beneath her teasing – had something happened between her and Linda away from the river?
Linda arched an eyebrow above her sunglasses, crossed one leg over the other. She was wearing a miniskirt today and a crocheted top with straps shaped like daises.
‘If you’re so keen for summer to end, to go to university,’ Joan said, with a singsong tone, ‘then why be down here at the river at all? The boys are up at the house, and the interesting adults too.’
‘It’s you who’s boy-crazy.’
‘I mean, isn’t that natural?’ Joan said with a mean laugh. They seemed to be arguing from the same point of view, arguing against themselves.
‘Joan is angry at me because she has a thing for Geoff,’ Linda announced.
‘Geoff?’ I asked, baffled. In my head, any time we didn’t spend with each other was time spent alone, or asleep, but what did I know about the other girls’ lives when I wasn’t with them?
‘I do not,’ Joan spat, rising up on her knees, hands in fists at her sides.
‘And Geoff has a thing for me.’
‘He has a thing for your tits.’
‘Hey!’ Sarah called out. ‘No arguing at the river.’
‘We’re not arguing,’ Joan said, and walked across the clearing to the old oak tree. She jumped up to grab the lowest thick branch. ‘Linda is just being a bitch,’ she added, hoisting herself onto it.
‘She’s so childish,’ Linda muttered.
‘I thought you said Geoff was a twat?’ I was making a pile of the Polaroids in my hand, the shallow depth of them like a measurement of the summer.
‘He’s not bad when you get to know him.’
‘What about your boyfriend back home?’ Sarah asked.
‘What about him,’ Linda retorted.
‘Is Geoff boyfriend material?’
What did that even mean? I pondered. I had been on some dates, group ones mostly, had kissed and been kissed, been felt up in the back of a cinema, and been sent several slapdash Valentine’s cards. But I didn’t want more than that; I didn’t want a boy looking at me soft and hopeful, being tied to someone like that.
Linda shrugged.
I rolled onto my back, feeling irritated, stung, as if she had disappointed me personally. I flicked my eyes near the sun, winced when they hurt.
‘You’ll roll on top of them,’ Sarah said, tugging a few photos from my side.
‘Do we have more booze?’ I asked.
‘Yes, do we, Linda?’ Joan asked, and then I heard the thud of her jumping down from the tree. She sauntered over, twisting her hips so that her feet meet in a perfect line ahead of her, holding her arms out like she was on a tightrope. ‘She has more, but she was saving it for a cosy date with Geoff.’
‘I wasn’t. I just didn’t think it was a good idea for us to get drunk down here. I didn’t want to carry any of you lot up the hill.’
It was a steep hill back to the hamlet, and nearly every time we climbed it one of us would groan and stop and say, God, do we have to go back? and be tempted to lie in the soft grass, to make a mattress from it.
‘Hand it over then,’ Sarah demanded. She poured a cup’s worth of neat gin because we had no more mixer; the only liquid we had was the river water that we scooped out or bent over to drink from when we got thirsty in the sun. She moved towards the river. ‘Are you coming?’
I slipped into the water behind her, glad for the distraction, for the pull and tug of the river, the burn of the cold on my skin, on my warm scalp as I dipped my head back. Camille followed too but Linda and Joan were still in a standoff, lying in the sun ignoring each other.
‘Maybe the water will help your bruise,’ Sarah said to Camille, holding the cup above the surface as she treaded water. She passed it to me and I took a sip, wincing at the taste and sipping river water afterwards as a chaser.
‘Maybe,’ she said. She sunk under the water fully, her outline hazy and green, a few bubbles rising above her. I paddled closer, waiting with the cup, grabbing onto her arm when she emerged with a splutter.
‘Here,’ I said, and Camille drank the rest of it. Our legs met under the water, her toenails sharp on my calf. I looked over my shoulder at Sarah, who was floating with her eyes closed, and then back at Camille.
In the golden light of the sun on the water, I could see every freckle and blemish on her face, the flecks of light in her brown eyes. It wasn’t fair.
Our legs tangled up again. I touched her waist to get my balance.
On the bank of the river, Joan was sitting up and watching us. I ducked under the water again. But my body was too buoyant, awkward in my attempts to swim away from Camille, kicking her accidentally and then popping up hardly a foot away.
‘Sorry,’ I said, and then swam in a backwards crawl that splashed Sarah and had her complaining.
Camille reached for the bank to get the cup refilled, gulping the whole thing down and then handing it to Linda when she grumbled that she was going to finish the bottle all by herself. When Camille slipped back into the river, she watched me, calm and intent, as I kneeled on the bottom and felt the surface trickle past my chin, burble against my lips, brackish and metallic. The reflected sun was almost violent this close to the water, flashing into my eyes.
She swam across to me with an awkward paddle. I told myself not to look over at Joan, not to worry if she was watching us. We weren’t doing anything out of the ordinary. I had swum topless with the others, had undressed them and done up the buttons of their dresses when their hands had curled into cold claws or their fingers pruned. I had brushed their hair and plaited it, spread suntan lotion onto burnt backs and shoulders and noses, shared clothes with them, photographed them. All Camille and I were doing was floating alongside one another.
We stayed there until we were shivering. Not talking to one another, just floating, swimming, ducking under the surface or lying back and looking at the sky, joining in the conversation between Sarah and Joan, and Sarah and Linda.
It’s the memory of that afternoon I remember most, viscerally – the bump of our legs, the slide of our arms, the way even when we weren’t touching I could feel the swell of the water from her moving limbs, the crest of her strokes lapping against me. Sometimes even now I can feel phantom presses against my skin, frozen spots, a trembling in my flesh, as though the world is a large vat of water and the cold echoes of her kicks are still rippling out towards me.
Chapter Twenty-One
They tour through the rooms of the house, Stuart and their female guide, with Maeve trailing after them, touching the edges of polished tables and chairs, the fringe of curtains and embossed wallpapers, snatching her hand back innocently each time the woman looks over her shoulder with a polite smile.
She’s keen on Stuart, Maeve can tell. The way she sways towards him, catches her fingertips on his chest when he makes her laugh.
‘I’m at your disposal today,’ she tells him as they cross the upstairs hall, past a tall marble table topped by an extravagant vase of dried flowers.
Stuart smiles back at Maeve and then she watches as the way he holds himself, his expression, changes. ‘You’re too kind,’ he tells the woman, his voice taking on a lilt, becoming ever so slightly camp. ‘Now tell me,’ he says, coming to a stop. ‘Is that Chanel?’ He points to the suit the woman is wearing.
‘No, it isn’t,’ she replies, her smile dimming.
‘It’s just a great look,’ Stuart says intimately, dipping his head.
‘Mmm,’ she says, her eyes darting out of the window. ‘Do you need my help with anything right now or shall we check in later?’
‘Later is good. I’ve got my assistant with me, after all.’ He winks at Mae
ve.
‘I’ll be in the office if you need me.’
‘Thank you, and thank you for the marvellous tour,’ he says, and he and Maeve are left alone in the mother of pearl room, its ceiling-high cabinets inlaid with milky hexagons.
‘You made her think that you were—’
‘No, I didn’t. I said a few things, let her draw her own conclusions.’
That didn’t account for the way he had changed his body, his self, like slipping into a different skin, she thinks.
‘Otherwise, she’d be following us around all day and we wouldn’t get any peace.’ He clears his throat. ‘Sorry about my lie earlier, I couldn’t think of a different excuse,’ he says carefully.
She doesn’t say that he could have just told the truth, that he was a friend of her parents. He looks like he expects her to be angry with him so she only says, ‘You’re a good liar.’
‘I told you I was. Now, let’s continue on our tour, shall we?’
‘I thought your project was about ruins?’ she asks, her flip-flops slapping against the fine polished floor.
‘If you talked to the owners of this house, they’d tell you that it was crumbling and that’s why they desperately needed funds. It will be crumbling in parts. There’ll be mould in corners of the ceiling, and the roof probably leaks and pipes have burst. But these are just the public rooms open to visitors. If we duck beneath the red ropes and go through the closed doors’ – he opens a door that has been built flush to the wall and patterned with the same greying wallpaper – ‘we might find some juicy secrets, or maybe just mice.’
‘Don’t say that,’ she says, clutching the back of his t-shirt as they shuffle into the narrow panelled corridor.