The Ophelia Girls

by Jane Healey

  ‘I’m late for something, I need to go,’ Stuart says on the phone.

  ‘Me too.’

  I return to the house, carrying the bottle inside from the patio and returning it to the high shelf above the fridge. The twins sit around the kitchen table as I make dinner, chicken in a white wine sauce. I sip from a glass of the cooking wine as I listen to their impassioned review of the film, as I answer their questions about why people don’t have swords any more, how they could make a magic potion and if there are any poisonous flowers in our garden, all the while feeling as if I am floating above myself or, when I catch sight of my hands and the murky reflection of my face in the windows as it turns dark outside, feeling that I have retreated so far inside myself that there is only a facsimile of me left, a dry husk.

  ‘Have you got everything in for tomorrow?’ Alex asks when he’s home, as he opens the fridge.

  He hasn’t noticed my turmoil. Perhaps a paper cut-out of myself is all anyone in this family needs. Perhaps the answer is to give up any lingering echo of my own desires. ‘What?’

  ‘The lunch?’

  ‘I forgot about it.’

  ‘Ruth,’ he sighs, like I have disappointed him, like a disappointed father. ‘But you’ve had time to finish the wine, I see.’

  ‘I used it for dinner.’

  ‘The sherry too?’ He nods to the shelf above the sink.

  ‘I’ll rustle something up from what we already have.’

  ‘Great,’ he says, unwrapping the dish of chicken.

  ‘Great,’ I repeat.

  ‘The last big meal of the summer, I imagine,’ he adds.

  The evening of the last dinner party of the summer of ’73 ended with two bodies being pulled from the water of the river.

  But no one needs to know that, no one needs to remember, least of all myself as I stand in the kitchen of my childhood home, and hear the drip-drip-drip of the kitchen tap and the rock forward of Alex’s chair that sounds for a moment like the knock of knuckles on the doorframe.

  Are you coming to dinner, slowpoke? Joan says in my memory, standing at the door where I stare now. The sooner we eat, the sooner we can go to the river.

  She winks and turns on the spot, pale petals drifting down from the garland on her head, skirt billowing out, and I want to freeze her there, to freeze myself too, young and hopeful and free.

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  The petals Maeve collected from the flowers Stuart had posed around the bath were ruined yesterday when her mother snooped in her room. Maeve tried to pick them up one by one, to lay them back in between the pages, but they stuck to her sweating hands, they folded over and tore. She cried onto the books and the petals, and the salt in her tears made her cheeks feel hotter, her mouth sore. Why couldn’t her mother leave her alone? she thought. Why did she have to ruin everything?

  At lunchtime the next day, returning sun-dazed from the field, the smeared remains of the petals are still there, rotting now in the heat. She thinks of telling Stuart about what happened, how he will offer to buy her a dozen new bouquets, pick the flowers himself if he has to. It’s not the same, she’ll tell him, and he will understand and that’s why they fit each other, why he is right for her.

  She’s not going to go downstairs for lunch, no matter how many times Ruth calls up. Maybe she’ll refuse to join her family for any meal, sneak things from the fridge and the pantry, eat in her room or outside. What can they do about it, anyway? There’s no way to punish her worse than how she feels.

  She slips into the junk room and rifles through the boxes carefully so that nothing falls or makes a noise. She’s looking for more photographs of that summer, of Stuart; even though she doesn’t have an emotional connection to the younger version of him, a blurry image is better than none.

  The twins are outside the window on the front lawn; they’re ratty today, contrary, shrieking, she could hear them earlier from her room. But it means that Ruth will have to supervise them, that she won’t have time to snoop, to dog Maeve’s steps. She’s been asking Maeve how she is, if she’s looking forward to school, if she’s growing gills spending so much time in the bath, using a bright nervous voice and looking at her with widened eyes. Her mother feels like she’s losing her, like Maeve is slipping her grasp. She doesn’t know that Maeve is already gone.

  A knock on the door of the junk room, and the cricket ball Maeve has been squeezing in her fist falls to the floor.

  ‘Can I come in?’ her mother asks.

  Maeve looks out of the window and sees the white hair of Mrs Quinn with her hand shading her eyes, watching Iza and Michael.

  Her mother knocks again and pushes the door open slowly, without, Maeve thinks viciously, actually waiting for an answer.

  ‘Are you looking for something?’ Ruth asks.

  ‘No,’ Maeve replies and then she changes her mind, her irritation at being found catching into anger. ‘Have you even looked in them? His boxes? They’re all dusty.’

  ‘I haven’t had the time.’

  ‘Like you didn’t have the time to visit him when he was ill?’

  A flash of anger, of hurt, across her mother’s face. Ruth taps her fingers on the shelf next to her, opens her mouth to speak and then combs her other hand through her hair. ‘My relationship with your grandfather was complicated.’

  She’s going to tell her something now, Maeve thinks. A small kind part of her wants to say, You don’t have to spill your secrets to me because you think you’re losing me, but the other part is only hungry.

  Ruth crosses her arms. ‘Your grandfather could be cold . . . callous. He wasn’t supportive like your dad is with you. Once I was eight or so, he left me alone to raise myself. It was a different time back then, I know, but still—’ She rubs a thumb over her wrist. ‘He didn’t like me, Maeve,’ she says carefully, ‘and I’m so glad you’ll never grow up like that, with a parent who dislikes you, who often seems to hate you.’

  ‘Why? Why did he hate you?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘There must be a reason.’

  ‘If there is, I don’t know what it is. Except that I couldn’t compare to my mother in his memory.’

  ‘Do you look like her?’

  ‘I look more like him.’

  ‘If he was so horrible, why did we see him at all?’ she presses, unsatisfied with her mother’s vagueness.

  ‘He wasn’t horrible to you. He was a good grandfather, he adored you . . . When he held you and watched you, I used to think, Oh, is this what he was like with me, after my mother died, when I was small?’ Her smile is pained. ‘I thought maybe being a grandfather had mellowed him out, even if he was still off with me, still cold. I thought we could put the past behind us. But then we were both at an event in London – it was an art opening, I didn’t know he would be there, I think he was with a client.’ Her eyes lose focus as she remembers. ‘I had just found out that I was pregnant with the twins. I ran into a friend at the event and I remember she was congratulating me, touching the bump, when I noticed him across the room, watching me. He looked . . . disturbed to see me, horrified.’ She shakes her head. ‘I don’t know how to describe it. He left the room, but I followed and caught up with him outside. He wouldn’t look me in the eye. He just kept asking me, What are you doing here? as if I had sneaked into his own private party or something.

  ‘I remember wondering whether he was there with someone he didn’t want me to see him with, a woman, a sensitive client, I don’t know. I’d never seen him like that, so flustered. Maybe I should have waited to tell him, phoned him up, but I thought he’d be happy to hear he was going to be a grandfather again.’

  ‘He wasn’t?’ Maeve asks as her mother’s voice trails off.

  ‘No,’ Ruth says dully, and then rubs her hand on her neck. ‘It’s such a mess, that conversation, I don’t even . . . He called me selfish, I remember that. He asked how I could do that to Alex, that if he had to raise children without me it wouldn’t be fair. Do you
want your daughter to be motherless? he hissed at one point. Do you know what damage that would do? I told him I wasn’t leaving Alex, that I didn’t know what he meant. Why would my children be motherless? Did he think something was going to happen to me like my mother?’

  Maeve knew that her grandmother had died in birth but had considered it only as an abstract, a family curiosity or a quiet absence, until she was hospitalized herself and started to think of her at odd times. This woman who went into hospital and never came out again, whose body carried her mother’s body inside her safe for nine months before failing. I’ve never liked hospitals, her mother had said near the beginning of Maeve’s stay. Who does? Maeve had retorted in her mind before remembering. The echoes of her mother’s grief scare her, the trace of the lost little girl in her voice, then as well as now.

  ‘I said it was fine,’ Ruth continues. ‘That I knew twins could be more dangerous but that I was fine, I was healthy, everything would be all right. He was so agitated though, so scornful, that I just let him go. He couldn’t hear anything I was saying.’

  ‘Maybe he was just shocked,’ Maeve says as her mother shakes her head.

  ‘It didn’t seem like shock, or like he was drunk, or, I don’t know . . .’ She opens her hands. ‘People don’t make sense,’ she insists with a tired, bitter bite to her words, with a resonance that Maeve doesn’t understand. ‘If there’s one thing I could tell you, it’s that people don’t make sense, Maeve. They let you down, they have their own . . . dogmas. They keep secrets, they do things that don’t make sense.’

  Does she know? Maeve thinks with a horrible clench in her chest, as her mother’s eyes dance over her face. Does she know what Stuart’s done, what she has done? ‘Did you try to talk to him again?’ she asks quickly, to distract her mother from any suspicions.

  ‘Yes, I tried to call him but he didn’t answer. I told Alex what happened and he couldn’t understand either, and asked me if I had remembered the argument right,’ she adds sorely. ‘He was worried about me, and the midwife was too, because I was so distressed about it. I kept thinking, OK, my father has some bad connotations with pregnancy that are coming out, terrible memories, delayed grief, but when he hears that the birth has gone fine, that we’re all fine, he’ll get over it. But he didn’t. When he finally answered his phone, he told me in a calm, reasonable voice that he didn’t want to see me, that I wasn’t welcome at home but he would still like to see his grandchildren, as if I were superfluous. I could drop you off, he said, and pick you up from the end of the drive, but that was it.’

  ‘You could have done that,’ Maeve says and her mother winces.

  ‘Well, call me selfish, but I didn’t want him telling you horrible things about me, things that he made up. Besides, I couldn’t trust that he wouldn’t do that to you, turn on you. I kept picturing you staying there and him being suddenly cold, mean. I couldn’t trust him with you, Maeve, especially not when you became ill – I couldn’t bear it if he upset you.’

  ‘You said he adored me.’

  ‘Maeve.’

  ‘It’s all about you. It’s you and what you want, and who cares about anyone else.’ It’s all about Ruth, Ruth and her father, Ruth and Alex, and Maeve is just a thing to be used and argued over.

  ‘Maeve!’ her mother calls, as Maeve shoulders her aside and runs along the hall.

  She skids down the stairs and then flees to the annexe, where no one will look for her. With the door shut behind her, she shoves the pillows off the bed, throws one at the wall and feels stupid doing it, melodramatic, hollow.

  It isn’t even that she blames her mother exactly or that she feels a longing for her grandfather any more, for what the cards and presents promised, after her mother’s story, the picture of an erratic man. It’s just that there’s nothing that’s hers, Maeve’s, except Stuart, and he’s not here.

  She lies down on the floor beside the bed. It feels only right for the stone of the floor to be so hard against her head, for her spine to ache.

  People keep secrets, she thinks once her breathing has slowed. If she is Stuart’s secret, something she has been happy to be up until now, if she is something cherished, if what they have is precious, does he have others? It’s only fun being a secret when he’s there too, when she knows he isn’t with someone else.

  Why didn’t he answer last night? Why didn’t he call her or send a message through her parents somehow? Lie, he was supposed to be good at that. Won’t he know how worried she feels?

  Is this what being abandoned feels like? she wonders some time later, when she has left the annexe for the unbearable heat of the field, prodding at the bruise inside her, trying to grasp the story she now inhabits. Has she been used and discarded?

  She doesn’t try to phone Stuart that night; she doesn’t want to hear that message again if he’s too busy for her. And if he is waiting for her call, she wants him to wait, to feel her worry. She’s not above being petty, she’s not perfect. But she’s not that strong either, she can’t be cool and confident. There’s a tremble in her ribcage, her heart fumbles its beats, and she bites at the skin around her nails until it comes apart in sore strips.

  Georgia used to dabble in Wicca; she had a spell book for modern witches that she showed Maeve. It was all rubbish, of course, Georgia said, but Maeve knew she didn’t think that – as with other things, Georgia liked the idea of control. When they read through the book side by side, they skipped over the healing section by mutual silent agreement – they weren’t that delusional – but everything else seemed fair game. Spells for protection, spells to find something you have lost, spells to make someone love you, spells to bring someone back . . .

  Georgia had smuggled in a candle from somewhere, but their first and only attempt to do a spell – one for luck maybe? Or protection? Maeve can’t remember – set off the sensitive fire alarm and caused a whole drama. The book was confiscated, along with the candle. Don’t worry, Georgia said to the ward sister with a wicked smile, I memorized the curses.

  It’s too hot now to think about candles and fire, but there are other kinds of spells, ones that come to Maeve instinctively.

  Like plucking petals from daisies – Does he love me? Does he love me not?

  Like running baths so full that when she enters them the lip breaks over the side and water floods on the bathroom floor until she makes her body still, so still that the only ripple of the surface is from the throb of her pulse in her neck – If no more water overflows, if she can make her spine float off the bottom of the bath so she’s weightless—

  —If she dresses exactly the same as the first day she met him, or the last—

  —If she makes her curls neat or wild, if she puts blusher on and lip-gloss and then scrapes it off—

  —If she touches herself lying on the bed in the annexe, if she doesn’t touch herself and makes the bed neatly instead—

  —If she runs another bath and gets in fully clothed, with the flowers she picked from the garden and the meadow, and arranges them around her, like her, like Ophelia, like the girl he wants her to be . . .

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  ‘Meet me at the river,’ Camille said to me that last day, as the families milled around the garden of one of the cottages, waiting for all the dishes, the plates and cups and wine bottles for dinner, to be brought out. ‘Tonight,’ she said, clutching my hand, her voice hushed but fervent. ‘I need to tell you something.’

  ‘All right,’ I replied, feeling a quiver through my body at the touch of her hand.

  We had been at the river that afternoon with the others but I had ignored her, or tried to, ducking my head, turning my body from her, chattering to Linda and Joan and Sarah. I had barely slept last night, veering from giddiness to fear, my skin hot and tight as if I had been in saltwater. I won’t do it again, I told myself and then, turning my face into the pillow, would picture Camille laid out before me, would imagine her hands in my hair, pushing me down her body.

  ‘Promise?
’

  There was a simmering vulnerability to Camille that was both enchanting and terrifying, like standing too close to a fire. ‘I will, I’ll meet you there,’ I promised.

  We sat at opposite ends of the tables; I couldn’t even see her during dinner unless I tipped my chair far back to catch a glimpse of her long hair, or leaned over my plate. But I thought of her as I ate, without tasting anything at all, as I talked to the girls near me, and as we drank our glasses of wine, which were refilled and refilled again on the urging of one of the fathers, who would be driving back to London tonight and wanted us all to finish the copious spare bottles of hessian-cradled wine he had brought with him.

  Was Camille lying about needing to tell me something, was it just an excuse? Maybe she was going to tell me she loved me. But what would I say in return? I’m sorry, I don’t feel that way. I’m sorry, you’re mistaken. How do you imagine this will work? What kind of world do you think we live in? I’m sorry, but I don’t know what you mean. It’s just girls being girls, it’s just the summer madness, it’s the river and the stories, we’re only confused.

  I wanted dinner to go on forever and I wanted it to be over as quickly as possible. It was so strange to me that no one other than me knew how tortured my mind was, how whirling my thoughts were. I must have been a good actress, I thought. At least it distracted me from the tug of war between Joan and Linda, and Geoff who sat between them lapping it up with an appearance of nonchalance. Every time I looked over he irritated me; his artfully furrowed brow, the way he held his cigarette as though he were a rebel and not just a teacher’s son, the way he leered at both girls like they were only meat.