by Jane Healey
Eventually she gets too hungry, too hot, to stay in bed, and picks up an apple and a pot of the twins’ Petits Filous from the fridge to eat with her fingers, hurrying through the front door before she’s seen.
The sun outside hits her like a clap but she keeps moving, across the gravel and through the disorientating shade of the tall bushes and trees either side of the gate, until she reaches the bright field and slips into the overgrown, yellowing grasses. She pauses at the top of the field and bites into the apple, which was once crisp but is now soft and lukewarm on her tongue. It’s impossible not to think of what she looks like right now, not to be both inside herself and outside, watching. With her loose hair and short purple dress, long bare legs and apple held in one pale hand, she would make a good picture. Click, she thinks, blinking her eyes and imagining Stuart is somewhere further below.
She trains her gaze on the woods and wonders if it’s any cooler inside them, what the river will feel like when she wades into it and lies down in the water, and, with a numb kind of curiosity, what will happen to her, what she will do, if Stuart doesn’t return.
Chapter Twenty-Four
There are muffled voices in the night – they drag me out of dreams of drowning, they rise and fall like the lap of water against stone – but by the time I am thinking straight and have heaved myself upright in the solid heat of the air, I’m unsure if they were only a dream, if the sound I catch snatches of is only the breathing of the house, the crackle of the fridge.
Sometimes I only remember them the next day as I wash my dry eyes, hold my wrists under the tap to cool them, and tilt my head as if I could catch the hazy memory.
‘Were you on the phone last night?’ I ask Alex one morning, when he wakes early for work and gets dressed with silent efficiency.
He looks at me over his shoulder. ‘I didn’t know you were awake. And no, I wasn’t. Are you having funny dreams again?’
‘I’m hardly sleeping. Didn’t you notice me tossing and turning?’
‘You know I sleep heavily.’
‘Well, I hope you have a good day at work.’
‘What’s that supposed to mean?’
‘Nothing! It was just small talk.’
I was trying to get things back to normal but I was too tired to make my voice sound anything but weary, and for weary read accusatory. In a marriage with children, you can’t ever say you’re tired and have it mean only that. ‘I’m tired’ becomes part of a competition or a recrimination, a result of something the other parent didn’t do.
‘I hope you have a relaxing day at home,’ he replies, doing up his tie.
‘Now you’re just being a dick.’
‘I meant it nicely. Have you seen the glorious weather outside?’ He tugs open the curtains and I wince. ‘What I wouldn’t do to sit out in the garden and not on the train or in an office without air-conditioning until 7 p.m., I mean, God.’
‘It’s too hot.’
He shakes his head in disbelief as he takes his wallet out of the bedside table. ‘When did you get so negative, Ruth? All your children are healthy now, you have the summer off from work, you live in this wonderful house. Why is your life so hard?’ He closes the drawer sharply. ‘Sorry, I’m just—’ He throws up his hands in quiet defeat. ‘I’m just trying to figure out how we got here, you know?’ He stops at the door with his back to me. ‘They say contempt is the sign that a marriage is really over, and I look at us and I think . . .’ He trails off, taps his knuckles on the doorframe and leaves.
I stare at the ceiling, my eyes burning, my body still. He deserves a better wife than me, and my children deserve a parent who doesn’t snap at them, who has the energy to play and not just nag.
Four nights into the heatwave, I hear it again. One voice, maybe two, and girlish laughter.
Is it the twins talking in their sleep?
I stand overheated at their open doorway but their bodies are still, quiet. I stand at Maeve’s closed bedroom door and hear nothing either. If Alex wasn’t still asleep in bed I would think it was him, phoning up some late-night lover.
I try to doze back to sleep, but I keep getting distracted by the shushing of Alex’s breaths which turn into waves in my mind, my body twitching like some unfortunate beached creature.
There. A feminine voice, a laugh. I grasp for the wall, the door, as I stagger out of the bedroom, blind from standing up too quickly. The world outside my head comes into view again and I wait, hand on clammy chest. The voices have stopped but there is a creak downstairs, the sound of something living.
I walk down the stairs, hand tight on the banister, and when I reach the bottom and look to my left my lungs spasm with panic.
‘Hello?’ I ask in a choked voice.
The dark shape moves and I make an awful moan, and then I realize that it’s only Maeve wearing a large t-shirt, her pale legs sticking out of the gloom.
‘What are you doing?’ I whisper.
‘Nothing,’ she replies.
The phone is missing from its cradle on the hallway table. ‘Were you talking to someone on the phone?’ Who would she be talking to? A friend? She hasn’t called any friends all summer. ‘Is something wrong?’
She puts the phone in her hand back with a soft beep. ‘No.’
‘Maeve.’
‘You’re going to think this is silly . . . but I was phoning the speaking clock.’
‘What?’
‘I woke up and my watch doesn’t work and I wanted to know the time. I remember someone mentioning it at hospital once, that you could call at any hour of day.’
‘You could have checked the clock in the kitchen.’
‘I told you it was silly.’
‘It’s fine. I just heard a noise.’
‘Sorry to wake you up,’ she says, as she climbs past me on the stairs.
I wait for the soft sound of her door closing before I take the phone and bring up the previous number dialled. Sure enough, it’s the clock. At the third stroke, it will be two thirty-two precisely.
I think about her late-night call the next day, as I struggle to open some of the windows on the second floor, their hinges rusted, the paint littering the carpet beneath them and only giving me more work to do. Was it because she woke up from a nightmare, or because she felt alone in the middle of the night? There is something horrible about the thought that she might be so desperate for comfort that she calls an automated voice.
Something isn’t right with her, I know it, and I’m not going to miss it again, to ignore it, like I did the pain she felt before I finally took her to the doctor’s.
I knock on her bedroom door, dumping my armful of laundry on the carpet. There’s no answer so I knock again, call her name, and then lean my hot ear to the wood. Hearing no signs of life, I open it carefully and walk inside, expecting to see something wildly out of place, something that explains what’s wrong.
Messy piles of clothes, tissues stained with smeared lipstick, the shine of CDs strewn near a Discman. Dusty soft toys at the bottom of her bed, unmade sheets that smell stale, air several degrees hotter than the rest of the house because the windows haven’t been opened. There’s a jewellery box on her desk that I don’t recognize, and when I lift the lid a ballerina spins to the brassy music. I snap it shut.
Does she still read? I wonder, looking at her shelves, at all the cracked spines, their colours soft and faded. When did I last see her with a book? What does she do all day, what world does she disappear off to?
I run my fingers along the books, so many too young for her now. Noel Streatfeild and Roald Dahl, the set of Narnia books that Alex and I used to read to her when she was quite little. I remember he and I had an earnest discussion about whether she should read the last book in the series, the one where everyone dies and turns up in a strange hallucinogenic heaven, and how it turned out to be her favourite. When I asked her why, she said it was because it was comforting that no one was left behind, that they all went to the same place. Ridiculous in
hindsight to try and protect her from death when she would come so close to it. Sick children make it hard to believe in any kind of merciful god.
I thumb through its pages and a spray of pink petals, dozens of them, falls out over my hands, onto the floor.
I stumble back, a cold flood around my heart.
They’re still soft, the petals, not yet crispy and dry, just like the ones I saw on her floor earlier this summer and hadn’t been able to find the plant they came from.
I pick up another book a few along and flick through it. More petals join the pile on the floor, yellow this time, so flimsy they flutter slowly down to the old carpet. The same carpet that I had as a child.
I stride to the other end of the shelf and take another book with trembling hands, shaking it out roughly by its spine as though I’m shaking out dust from a cloth. White confetti falls, dozens and dozens of petals so thin that when I bend down to touch one, the barest smear of my fingertip tears it into nothing.
Another book conceals the same secret, and another one, and again. Small daisies and blue cornflowers and orange dahlias. So many petals, so many flowers, all hiding here innocuous in her books, hiding beneath the faded covers, and now the air smells of them, of bouquets held in sweaty hands, of drooping fistfuls of flowers and garlands gone limp in the sun—
‘Mum!’ a voice screams, and I am being pushed away from the shelf by Maeve. ‘Get out of my room! What are you doing?’ She scrabbles at the petals on the floor. ‘You’ve ruined them! Why would you do that? You’ve ruined them,’ she says, sobbing. ‘I hate you!’ she swears.
‘I’ll get you more, I promise, I’m sorry.’
‘You can’t,’ she says. ‘Just get out! Get out!’
I back up towards the door, hands raised as if to ward off a wild animal. ‘I’m so sorry.’
She never said where she got the flowers from; but where did we get our flowers from? My garden, other people’s gardens, the florist. Has she been walking all the way to the village? Cycling there?
I stop in the doorway. ‘Maeve, I just have to say—’
‘Get out!’
‘If you’re cycling to the village on the road or you’re walking there, it’s just too dangerous; there’s blind spots on the lanes, you could be run over.’
‘I’m not going to the village.’
‘Please, Maeve.’
She slams the door shut in my face and I flinch back, wanting to cry myself.
The heat makes alcohol hit your body harder, at least that’s what it feels like to me. Sitting on the patio two glasses of sherry down, my head feels like cotton wool and the muscles in my face are treacle-slow. The twins are watching yet another video, I’ve failed as a mother, and I am cursing this hellish heatwave that shows no sign of ending, the yellowing grass in front of me a marker of shame. I’ve brought the phone out with me in case it rings with one of the handymen Alex said was going to call, and so he can’t complain at me for not answering, and sure enough, right when I think my face is probably beginning to burn despite the sun lotion, it rings.
It takes me a few moments to identify the caller because he sounds equally surprised to be calling.
‘Stuart?’
‘. . . Ruth? Hello, there.’
‘What are you calling for?’
‘To check you hadn’t chucked my things out of the annexe yet, of course.’
‘Oh yes, we’ve got guests lining up for the five-star luxury here. Do you know,’ I say, reaching for the bottle and sitting up so I can get my hand around it properly and bring it towards me, ‘the black mould in our utility room is growing – it’s on the ceiling now and I think it’ll spread upstairs soon, I noticed it this morning. Do you think that it’s bad to breathe in? I think it is. It’s lucky the twins don’t have any in their room. This house is a death trap,’ I grunt as I pull out the sticky bottle topper.
‘Put Alex on it – he should get his hands dirty, do some good honest work.’
I laugh. ‘What’s wrong with the chemical business?’
‘Oh, where to start.’
I sip the sour bubbles of the sherry, vile stuff. ‘We miss you, you know.’ It’s easy to forget our last terse conversation, easy to feel hungry for his friendship again.
‘I miss you too.’
‘I doubt that somehow. Where are you now? Is that a party in the background, at’ – I twist my empty wrist – ‘whatever o’clock it is.’
‘No, just city noise.’
‘I miss that too. Hold up the phone for me.’
‘Ruth.’
‘Go on.’
He does as asked. I close my eyes and press the phone tighter to my ear, so hard the cartilage of my ear hurts, but I can’t make out the sound of traffic on the road or beeping traffic lights, heels on pavement or laughter ringing down an alleyway, snatches of conversations as people hurry past. Just a muffled hum and a few horns.
‘You got it?’ he asks.
‘Sure. Sorry, I’ve been rambling on, what did you want?’
‘I think I might have meant to phone someone else actually?’ he says, sounding baffled. I picture his squint, the tilt of his head, how he’ll smile like he’s making fun of himself.
‘I’m glad you called, I was going stir-crazy here. This heatwave . . .’
‘Tell me about it. At least my hotel has a pool.’
‘Git,’ I swear.
‘I’m joking. How is everyone? The twins? Maeve?’
‘My children are turning feral in this heat. Maeve is cycling through her missed teenage years at lightning speed.’
‘Mad dogs and Englishmen. Where are you right now?’ he asks.
‘On the patio, looking at the overgrown lawn.’
‘I can picture you there,’ he says, and I think that I don’t want anyone to picture me as I am now; old, sweaty, burned, halfway to drunk. ‘Actually, Ruth, I’ve been thinking about something.’ The background noise has dipped as though he’s sheltering in a doorway. I hear his breath against the receiver – does he hear mine too? ‘You lied to me about the ponds, didn’t you?’
‘No? I lied to Alex about going to them.’
‘Ruth.’ He sounds disappointed in me. Kind, but disappointed. I want to tell him to piss off. I want to tell him, to trust him.
‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’ I stand up carefully, each movement precise despite my dizziness, despite the queasy knot in my stomach, pulling out the chair and pushing it back in with a quiet scrape of the patio stone.
‘That figure you mentioned following,’ he says as I look for shade in the garden – there’s only bushes inside the walls of the back garden, the fruit trees are outside it, the larger trees are on the boundaries of the property or at the front of the house, and I can’t exactly lie down next to a bush. ‘It was a woman, wasn’t it?’ Some of the branches of an apple tree shade part of the bench at the back, and that is where I sit, the dry wood scraping my bare thighs, my feet white in the sun. ‘You went to the ponds once a week to swim with a woman; you went for her,’ he says.
‘I don’t know what you’re talking about,’ I repeat. Could I hear the twins from here if they called for me? I stand up on my tiptoes but the flower beds, the lavender bushes, the azalea and rhododendrons are too tall. Too tall to see over but not tall enough to shelter behind.
‘You can tell me, you know, like I told you last time. I’d never judge you.’
Like he told me last time. I shake my head, the phone dangling from my hand. Like he told me last time.
‘Ruth? Are you still there?’
‘I’m here.’
‘Was it because of Alex’s fling?’
‘When did I tell you about that?’
‘I overheard you arguing.’
‘I don’t see why any of this is your business,’ I note, standing up and stepping into the sun.
‘It isn’t, you’re right. I guess I just assumed you might not have anyone understanding to talk to, someone who knows Alex, who k
nows you.’
‘Do you think we’re still the same as we were back then? Don’t you think people change?’ I tug at a bunch of lavender and the whole bush shakes, two white butterflies flee.
Her name was Sylvia, the woman at the ponds, a pretty name for a handsome woman who wore her hair short and black and had the mahogany lipstick of someone who worked in the media, who was artsy, serious. Lipstick lesbian, I had thought the first time I saw her, having read such a phrase a few years ago, in an article about how it was now hip to be gay. She was the one I had followed through the park and the one who I swam with once a week when I was pretending to be at therapy. It was she who had befriended me, but it was me who never told her about my husband and children, hiding my wedding ring in the pocket of my jacket, never mentioning that I had come from the hospital where Maeve was seriously ill and that after I left the ponds or the cafe in Hampstead where we went for tea and cake, still smelling of pondwater, of weeds and damp cold things, I would be returning there too, or hurrying home to pick up the twins from their minder.
Why lie to her? Why cheat on my husband and my children like that?
Nothing happened with Sylvia, except her finding out the truth in one awkward phone call to our flat when Alex had handed me the phone and I had to say my husband in response to her question of who she had just spoken to, and tell Alex that it was just a mother I had had coffee with, while inside I was dying, pickled in the worst kind of shame and burning regret. Our friendship had been teetering at the threshold of being something more and I had spent our time apart daydreaming, picturing her and me and an impossible life together, all the gut-wrenchingly embarrassing minutiae of it that makes me sweat now to remember. The perversity of imagining such a cosy married life with someone other than my husband.
That was the night when it rained and I stole into the park, walking through the dark like I wanted to be swallowed by it, as if I were daring all those seedy strangers who were supposed to live in parks eager to prey on women taking shortcuts to come and get me, gasping at every shift of tree in the wind, every crack of branch in the undergrowth, too far gone to cry. I climbed the locked gate, shed my clothes and slipped naked into the black pool of the water, so dark it seemed like my limbs had been neatly erased, that I was only my head, my thoughts. But there was nothing to be found there, no answers, no relief, just the muscles of my body burning, my feet dragging through the silty water and a chill that made me despair, at both the boundless cruelties of nature and at myself for performing such an empty ritual. Grown-up now, I could no longer sink into a picturesque story, an imagining, when I dipped my body into water, couldn’t see the beauty in my tragedy, only the embarrassment.