by Jane Healey
‘Maeve?’ her mother’s voice calls. From downstairs? Or from the stairs themselves?
Stuart swears under his breath and strides towards the door.
‘Hi, Ruth,’ she hears him say from the hall. Stupid of him not to just hide, Maeve thinks hysterically. For someone who’s survived wars he has a terrible sense of self-preservation.
‘Have you seen Maeve?’
‘I’m coming, Mum!’ she calls.
A moment to check her reflection, to see the red rub around her mouth that she can’t do anything about.
‘Everyone’s waiting,’ her mother says as Maeve walks down the stairs. ‘What were you doing?’ She looks at Maeve and then at Stuart.
Is this the moment when she realizes? Maeve wonders with a flicker of panic, the scene in front of her bright and vivid – the dust motes streaming down past her, the reflection of the three of them in the hall mirror, the shine of the banister under her hand. Is this it, the rupture?
‘I was looking in the junk room,’ Stuart says. ‘Poking about, you know me.’
Her mother’s smile looks strained. She looks worn out, old and tired. Maeve feels a little guilty as she follows her to the kitchen but it’s quickly dampened when Stuart reaches back to tug at her dress, throwing a smile over his shoulder and then asking Ruth if there’s anything he should bring out to the table.
‘Just you,’ her mother replies. ‘Penny is dying to meet you properly,’ she adds.
Maeve repeats her mother’s sentence in her head as she sits down at the table, smiling politely at the adults who shift in their seats to see her as if they don’t know what to do with a teenage girl. Don’t worry, you won’t have to put up with me for long, she thinks, sneaking looks at Stuart and ignoring Penny, who is blonde but old, too old for Stuart’s tastes.
‘Can I have some wine?’ Maeve asks, because she’s barricaded by the twins on one side and three more children on her other side.
‘It’s good for children to start drinking at home,’ one of the husbands opines without looking at her, ‘better than having your first taste at university. I had a friend whose parents were deathly teetotal, Presbyterian, you know, and he had to get his stomach pumped in his first week.’
‘It’s always the boys that happens to, haven’t you noticed,’ a woman – his wife? – notes.
‘Girls just hide their wildness better,’ Penny says.
Maeve rolls her eyes.
‘Don’t you agree, Ruth?’
‘What?’ Ruth replies distractedly.
Her mother’s hair is flat, Maeve notes; her polo shirt looks tomboyish next to the other women in their summer tops and cardigans.
‘Girls are wilder.’
‘They can be, yes,’ Ruth replies and reaches for the wine bottle.
‘It’s like Diana,’ one of the husbands says. ‘There she was, meek as a schoolgirl, and you had no idea what was lurking beneath. Her and the Harrods heir.’
‘It is a little hard to stay sympathetic when she’s busy playing up for the cameras and swanning about on yachts in tiny swimsuits.’
‘Oh, are they tiny? I hadn’t noticed,’ the first man jokes.
‘I don’t think she’s playing up for the cameras,’ Ruth interjects. ‘They’d be photographing her whatever she does. I think she’s just living, enjoying her freedom.’
‘As a photographer, what do you think?’ Penny asks Stuart.
Iza is kicking Maeve in the shin but she’s too busy watching Stuart to pay attention to her. It’s hard enough to remember to eat and the wine has already gone to her head.
‘What do you mean?’
‘Does she know the camera is there?’
He shrugs. ‘I don’t really keep up with the royals.’
Penny snorts. ‘And yet there you were in Harper’s last month in the society pages. Ruth showed me.’ She nods.
‘Ruth,’ Stuart teases, ‘am I in your scrapbook?’
‘You’re avoiding the question,’ Ruth answers, smiling over the rim of her glass of wine.
Stuart is wearing a similar smile now and Maeve feels a twang of uneasiness. It’s so bright today and the grass is dry and harsh under their feet, the wood of the table so parched that splinters stick up.
‘Photography is about power,’ he muses. ‘The people I photograph think they’re powerful, that I’m there to witness their greatness. But I have the power; I choose what pictures to take and which versions of them to preserve.’
‘What about photos of you?’ Ruth counters.
‘What’s the story with you two anyway,’ Penny interjects, taking off her cardigan. ‘You and Stuart.’
‘Stuart went to university with Alex and me, we shared digs.’
‘A love triangle, was it?’
‘No.’
‘She doth protest. I have a nose for this kind of thing. I think there was something between you two.’
She looks over to Alex, who clicks his tongue and points his wine glass at Penny.
‘Oh, do I have the right of it, then?’ Penny laughs delightedly. ‘Second best, were you, Alex dear?’
Maeve feels sick. Her gut roils, an iciness throbs from her heart. Her eyes flick back and forth between her parents and Stuart. They’re joking, surely? Just one of those horrible bawdy jokes that adults make when they drink and think that they’re teenagers again, forgetting that they’re supposed to be grown-ups now, parents.
The table is talking about Diana again, about some tabloid gossip. Stuart isn’t looking at her; he’s concentrating on the salmon on his plate, eating with neat movements. Did he eat like that in wartime? she thinks nonsensically. Did he eat with a silver knife and fork off an unbroken china plate while bombs careened outside, while dust was blown in through the windows?
The shock of the conversation dulls to a queasy shiver. Her horror turns to anger at her parents for playing along, for being so cosy with Stuart. Why do they have to ruin everything?
And yet, at the end of lunch, nauseous with the sun and everything else, Maeve can’t help but ask her father, as she helps him clear the table while the other guests, including Stuart, linger further in the garden, what he had meant.
‘What did Penny mean? About you and Mum and Stuart?’
A neighbour’s cat has ventured into the garden and now everyone, adults and red-cheeked children, are cooing at it, marvelling as it cautiously picks its way across the lawn.
Her father stacks the glasses, catches one when it slips with a squeak in his hand. ‘Stuart was your mother’s first boyfriend,’ he says. ‘One of the summers here before university.’
‘She never said that,’ Maeve replies, voice cracking, making her father stop to look at her. Stuart never said.
‘You know your mother and I dated other people before we met – it doesn’t mean anything, Maeve. We’re allowed to have lives apart from one another.’
‘Like your one-night stand,’ she spits out, waiting until she sees his shocked reaction before she turns and runs, heels sore on the hard ground, sobs jolting out with each stride.
Chapter Twenty-Eight
In my dreams each night, I am in the river and so are the girls, a shoal of us, limbs sliding over limbs, hair tangled together, toes kicking up pebbles that roll underneath us, that tumble, joining with rocks and branches, creating a wave that grows in power, that spills over the banks. In my dreams we leave the river, laughing, to find a flooded landscape, and as we wade through it our high spirits recede. We trip over submerged obstacles, we lose all sense of direction. We start to cry. Staggering through the cold water, searching for something familiar to guide our way.
The lunch is done. Food has been eaten, wine drunk, a good show of normalness put on. I am serene. Or am I numb? Maybe they’re both the same thing.
‘Thanks,’ Alex says, as I enter the house looking for more wine to top up our guests’ glasses.
‘For what?’
He looks at me and I can’t read him. ‘For lunch.’
‘Sorry, I’ve been a bit in my head. I guess it’s the heat.’ It’s funny that despite not having a mother myself, I seem to have picked up the natural maternal tendency to apologize. Sorry about dinner, sorry about my hair, sorry I’m not dressed up, sorry I haven’t done enough today, sorry that I’m not enough.
‘Maeve is in a huff,’ he notes, opening the fridge. ‘She asked me about Stuart and you, and I told her you had a history. I think she has a crush on him.’
‘We hardly have a history.’
‘Sure,’ he says, and drains the last splash of wine from his glass.
‘Stuart and I were never an item, what do you mean?’
‘Where do you get off telling her my private business, our private business?’ He presses his glass to his chest. ‘You told her about what happened on my business trip – what the hell, Ruth?’
‘Of course I didn’t tell her! She must have overheard.’
He shakes his head.
‘I feel like you’re blaming me.’
‘You’re never to blame, are you?’
‘That’s not true, not at all.’
He tears a chunk from the loaf on the bread board. ‘Stuart used to talk about you, back in university before I met you. There’s always been something between you anyway, you’ve always been weird about him. There’s this tension there, I mean, come on.’
‘He had a crush on me when we were younger, that was all. You know you were my first boyfriend. And why are we even talking about this? I don’t—’ I hold up my hands, drop them at my sides. ‘Is Maeve in her room?’
Alex leans against the kitchen counter, bending his upper body towards me. ‘You used to show off for him when we all lived together. You loved that he had a thing for you.’
Sometimes, when Stuart saw Alex and me together there was a part of me that wanted to say, See, you were wrong about me, I am normal; to prove myself to him. No one else had noticed my interest in women except for him and it worried me, drew a thread between us, perhaps was even a reason why I kept him close. One night, drunk and high after my second-year exams, I had become convinced that Stuart was out in the hall watching us have sex through the crack in the door, and it was a notion, an imagined threat, a kind of twisted fantasy, that stuck with me as time went on, even though I hated myself for it. I overcompensated during sex, performed for an audience in my head, trying so hard to convince us both that I was straight and that my feelings for Camille had just been a phase, that I believed it. After all, why else would I think about him watching me if it wasn’t that I was interested in him doing so, if it wasn’t that I was interested in men? I didn’t know then that fear – of being found out, of someone watching me and knowing – and anxiety could be identical to arousal to a body, lighting up the same nerve endings. It was the way Alex and I were when Maeve was ill that clued me into it, that made me see. How the stress of it all made me feel as if I was desperate for sex, my body fizzing like a live wire, but that I never felt any satisfaction and barely ever climaxed, just stayed awake afterwards, agitated and aching, feeling a queasy sickness in my gut.
How long has it been since I’ve had sex without thinking about what I look like from the outside, what someone might see if they look at me? How long have I used some disapproving figure to make my body tight with nerves and ignored what I actually want?
‘I know you—’
No, you don’t, I want to say. I barely know me.
‘—and to be honest, it did come into my mind when he talked about needing somewhere to stay. More fool me,’ he barks a laugh, ‘but I thought that maybe it would help rekindle things between us.’ He waves at the physical distance between us, the kitchen table with its detritus. ‘Or at least that you might take the out.’
‘Take the out,’ I repeat. I can feel my jaw trembling. ‘You think I’d have an affair with him? I don’t want him, I never did.’
‘Well, you don’t want me, either. What do you want?’
I shake my head and then stop, catching the hazy scene out in the garden, the happy families talking and drinking and watching their little darlings tumble across the lawn. Iza and Michael are there, sitting next to one another on a rug. I can see them, I can tell it’s them, even though I can’t make out their faces. I would know the shape of them anywhere, their gait, their gestures, their voices, the smell of them when they were warm babies reaching their arms towards me. ‘I can’t do this right now. I don’t know what you want from me.’
‘I want to separate,’ he states.
‘I need to find Maeve.’
‘Ruth, did you hear me?’
I pause on the threshold.
‘Ruth, did you hear me? I want to separate.’
‘They’ll need you in the garden, they’ll need wine top-ups,’ I say, leaving without looking back.
*
I stayed with Stuart that last evening of summer when I should have followed Camille away from the table and the crowd. I was nodding along to what he was saying, acting like he was the only person I was thinking about, touching my hand to his arm, his chest, watching the effect of my feigned interest, the way his eyes got softer and he tugged on his hair with a nervous, excited twitch of his shoulders.
I couldn’t tell you what he was saying, what was supposed to have me so riveted. I only remember the heat of him under my hand, that it felt wrong, that I knew it wasn’t the body I wanted to touch, that the smell of him – sweat and the joint that one of the boys had handed him – was wrong. I drank from the glasses I was handed as the other teenagers gathered close, took a few pulls from joints and cigarettes, watched as Linda and Joan lingered by Geoff, twirling their hair, pouting their lip-glossed lips, looking up through their eyelashes. They looked ridiculous; they looked meek compared to their river selves, to the beautiful, enchanting girls I had photographed.
‘Here,’ Stuart said at some point, ‘you’re not doing it right.’ He took the sloppily rolled joint from my hand and inhaled deeply, and then he took my face in his hands and his lips met mine and he exhaled. I breathed in the smoke, dry, harsh, sore in my parched throat, and then I coughed it out, pushing him back.
‘That’s how it’s done,’ Geoff crowed, clapping a hand on my shoulder, and I shrugged him off too. My feet were unsteady, my head was swimming from all the wine.
‘Let’s go to the river,’ someone said. A girl’s voice but I don’t remember whose.
‘Oh, are we allowed now? You don’t want to keep it a girls only space?’ Geoff mocked.
We made a vow, I thought, my tongue too slow to speak, my face tingling.
But no one was thinking of that now; they were only thinking that this was one of the last nights of summer, a last opportunity to do something, to have something to tell the others back at school, a story for social currency. After all, we couldn’t tell other people about the photographs, about the Ophelia girls – the magic would vanish when we were back in our grey pinafores and tight ties, back in a rainy quadrangle waiting for the bell to ring for lessons and sitting in rows behind cramped desks.
I didn’t want to go but I went anyway, tumbling down the hill of the meadow as the light waned, the giddiness of the crowd of us making my heart race, my head spin. I was laughing at one point, I remember that, and Stuart tugged me up by my hand when I tripped over. Sarah was singing and so was the other boy whose name I can’t remember, singing so loudly it sounded like squawking, kicking at the grass in front of them. Geoff was giving Joan a piggyback, her head swaying in the air in front of me, her black hair waving like a flag. The sky was pink and a colder breeze made me shiver, made me wish I was in bed, but my bed was so far away. It was only when we entered the woods, the whoops and shouts echoing strangely off the trees, that I thought Camille might still be waiting here for me, that we would find her there, lonely and pitiful with flowers braided in her long hair. I moved ahead, pushing my hand against tree trunks, stumbling as I tried to get there first so that no one else saw her like that, so vulnerable. T
he undergrowth, the bushes and roots and felled branches, were scratching at my legs even though I took the same route as usual, but I kept moving, unsteady and dizzy, as though if I stopped I might fall head first.
She wasn’t there. In the dim dusk light, the bank and the river in front of me were both empty, untouched, calm, and then the noise of the others grew like thunder and a crowd gathered, blocking my sight of the water. The alcohol hit then, and I lost some time. I was leaning against a tree; Stuart was standing in front of me talking again, talking about his plans, about law, about something to do with my father. I could see figures on the other side of the bank. A girl resting against a tree just like me, a girl with black hair and pale legs sticking out of her skirt that was being pushed up by the boy in front of her. I saw her arms shove him away feebly and then fall, I saw her head loll to the side and heard her slurred words and then, so quick I reached towards Stuart for balance, as though the whole world were tipping, he was tugged off by Linda who was shouting, shoving at Geoff’s chest, pushing him back. He laughed, and then she pushed him again and he leaned too far back, falling and falling and hitting the water awkwardly, loudly.
I slumped to the ground, my legs giving out, and Stuart tried to help me up.
Geoff was thrashing in the water, calling out, and a girl was being sick on the bank. There was noise and movement and then it was quiet. Then Stuart was gone, jumping into the river along with everyone else, and Geoff was being dragged back up the bank, and Joan was crying and Sarah was too, and someone was hunched over him, shaking him, pushing at his chest.
He coughed and spluttered, groaned but wouldn’t sit up.
‘He’s fine,’ someone said, as a girl called out for someone to run to the house and get a parent, an adult, to help. ‘You’re fine, aren’t you, Geoff,’ they said. Was it Linda?
Geoff coughed again, turning on his side.
People were arguing. A whirl of drunken motion in front of me, the dark of the night pulsing, the forest breathing.
By the time the bobbing of torches heralded the arrival of the adults from the cottages, the mood on the riverbank had calmed, my head was clearer and I was on my feet again. Most of the parents had come, although not my father of course, and not Camille’s parents either. Someone had brought a blanket that they wrapped around Geoff as he stood shivering, shell-shocked. Linda and Joan were holding hands, inseparable once again, and I remember thinking jealously that it was all right for them, that they could touch and have it mean nothing but friendship, sisterhood.