by Jane Healey
‘Good,’ she repeats, thinking of what Stuart meant when he called her good, and what her parents mean. Whether she will ever feel good again, feel anything but hollow.
‘You know what I mean. The twins need you to set an example for them – they need you, Maeve.’
‘They need Mum.’
‘Well, she can’t be with them right now. She needs to get better. It’s only going to be a couple of months. Then things will go back to normal.’
No, they won’t, she thinks of replying, pointing out that their divorce, and being shuttled between two homes, is unlikely to feel normal to the twins. But, as sullen and contrary as she feels, even she has limits when she sees how tired her dad looks, when she knows how much her mother has scared him.
On her last night in the house, Maeve stays awake until the small hours, listening. To the wind that scratches the early fallen leaves across the gravel of the drive, to the creaks of floorboards that she can imagine might be footsteps, to the sudden rain shower that splashes drops through her open window which reach as far as her pillow, and to the silence of the phone.
It takes her a few days to unpack her things in London, and she thinks it will take her quite a bit longer to work out what to put on the walls of her room in the attic of her dad’s new rented house, what to do with the stacks of postcards and prints of art, the five photos of her that are all she has left of the summer, of him.
Now she’s set up her radio, and with the soundproofing of the eaves, she can play music late. If she stands on her bed she can swing open the skylight and lean her elbows on the windowsill, look out across London. The tinny beat from the radio, the soaring vocals of the song, can mix with the shunt of a late-night train, warring cats on a street nearby, the hum of traffic.
The air feels thicker here, sour-sweet with hot rubbish and tarmac, and the sky glows above the rooftops and tower buildings dotted with red airplane warning lights, blots out the stars.
London is so vast she can never hold the shape of it in her head, and she only knows such a small part of it, even after a childhood here. But she’s not a child any more. She can go to bars and parties, stay out late. She can smoke, drink, dance up close to someone in a club, dizzy with strobe. People she meets now won’t know that she’s been ill, and she can’t decide if that is unnerving or thrilling.
You could become someone new here, she thinks, playing her fingers in the warm breeze, lose yourself, find yourself. You could run into anyone here.
Chapter Thirty-Four
This is a dry facility, they told me when I was admitted, and I admit that I laughed out loud. Not the best first impression to make when you’ve been trying to convince everyone around you that you don’t need their help.
It was voluntary, my coming here, I wasn’t dragged or forced, and when I saw the face of the kind consultant who interviewed me go still when I mentioned the river, I was the one who quickly said, I think I need something residential, just for a little while.
Yes, she said, I’ll get the forms you need, and I clasped my hands in my lap tightly and looked at the floor.
My time here is being paid for from the money we had set aside for private schooling for the twins, more guilt to add to the load, even though Alex, logical as ever, had brought out the stats to show that the state schools the twins could go to back in London were just as good. Still, when I’m in the twice-weekly art therapy sessions – which sometimes feel like the only things that are keeping me sane here – it does feel wrong and topsy-turvy, selfish, to be messing about with paints while Alex is stuck with our children, dealing with the mess I’ve left behind.
Alex is reluctant to come to joint therapy sessions while I’m here, or later. What’s the point of rehashing everything? he says, without irony. I know we can parent civilly together. You just need to get your head down and get through your time there, learn your triggers and some new coping mechanisms – terms he’s cribbed from a book and will now repeat ad infinitum as though he is the one who coined them, but at least he’s trying in his own way – and then go back to work and everything will be fine. You’ll be fine, Ruth.
He knows about the girls now – the drowned ones, the Ophelia girls – but doesn’t really understand why they’re important. He doesn’t know about the women yet. I’m not ready for that; I don’t want him to hate me more than he already does, and besides, I don’t actually know who I am, I don’t know what I want.
Maybe I’m just confused, I tell the therapist I see here, and she tilts her head to the side and asks, Do you believe that?
Well, if you know what I believe then why don’t you just tell me? I think of saying.
We talk about my mother in therapy. We talk about my father. We talk about how, when I left home as a teenager, I thought I had left them there too, without realizing that I had taken them with me, coiled and barbed inside.
Maeve won’t talk to me. I hear her telling Alex to fuck off when he asks her to take the phone and have to tell him not to get too frustrated at her. She’s being childish, he says, and rude. You’re her mother.
Things are fraught between them. She’s not his little girl any more and he doesn’t know how to deal with that.
‘You wanted her to be a normal teenager,’ I tell him during our latest call. ‘Teenagers are supposed to be moody and difficult.’
‘Is what she did normal? She crossed the line this summer. Sorry, I know Stuart took advantage but it’s not like she isn’t responsible at all, she’s not a child.’
‘Do you tell her that? Alex—’
‘Of course I don’t talk to her about it, I don’t even want to think about it. Come on, Ruth.’
‘I can come home if she needs me, I’m doing better. I mean, I’m fine, really.’
I listen to the muffled scrape of the phone across his face as he turns his head to call the twins for tea. I’m sitting at the empty desk in my bedroom, running my palm across the groove some past resident has made with a pen. In the group meeting earlier I told a room full of strangers about how, when Maeve had just got ill and I was trying to juggle hospital appointments with the twins being unreasonable toddlers, I used to pour a shot – or two – of whisky into my mid-morning coffee, just to keep me going.
‘I don’t think that would help,’ Alex says kindly. ‘I think the best thing you can do is to get better. The kids have to get used to living in separate houses anyway. We have to get used to a new normal.’
It doesn’t escape my notice that Maeve and I have swapped places, that I am now institutionalized and under the care of medical professionals, that she was the one who pulled me out of the river. In worrying that I was a terrible mother, I became one, made her grow up too quick, burdened her.
So much of my time here is spent being asked to ruminate on the past. The past is where my hurts are, but my therapist wants me to reach back and rummage in all the boxes, lay each piece out on the ground for us to study. Stuart is one of those pieces, one of the shards that hurts when I pick it up. What he did, the secrets he kept.
Do you think I should call him up? I asked my therapist, half jokingly, try and get some answers from him? Do you think that would help?
What do you think? she replied with irritating sincerity. What do you want to do?
It’s a sunny afternoon as I linger in the empty rec room, with its dry houseplants and table strewn with old magazines. I have the phone in my hand, a queasy tremor working its way through my chest.
‘It’s Ruth,’ I say when he answers.
‘How are you?’ he asks, after silence has stretched across the line.
I tongue the inside of my cheek, marvelling at his even tone. ‘As well as can be expected, I suppose.’
‘I was going to ask if you wanted me to drop over some contraband, a good Chianti maybe.’
I bark a laugh. ‘You would. You don’t think I have a drinking problem?’
‘No more than he did, your dad.’
‘Dear old Dad.’
‘Mm.’
I flick at the curled edges of the magazines, folding and unfolding the tips of the pages, before walking to the window overlooking the gardens. I can feel my pulse in my wrists, my hot face. I don’t know how to start this conversation. Trying to reconcile our shared past with what he did this summer makes me feel dizzy. ‘You got the better deal there, you know, from him.’
‘Yeah,’ he says and then clears his throat. ‘Did you ever wonder why I never went back there in the holidays to see my dad, or yours? Why I stopped talking about law?’
‘I mean, I knew your dad was a bully,’ I say, ‘I wouldn’t imagine you would be keen to see him.’
Outside, a bird hops across the wet lawn. I track it with my finger pressed hard to the glass.
‘You’d be right about that,’ he says. ‘He beat the shit out of me at the end of that summer. He broke my nose, and a couple of ribs. You didn’t see me because I got the first train to my mum’s the next morning. I still had a black eye my first week at Cambridge.’
‘You never said.’
‘I should have said, I think that now. I regret not telling you about it, and about your father.’
‘What about him?’
‘Well. Your father took a shine to me, you know that part at least.’ There’s a noise in the background of the call; a tap turning on and off. ‘And he had all the things I dared to hope for as a boy with a violent, thick father and a useless mother . . . the nice things, the house, the power and connections, you know. He told me I was idealistic, and foolish. That wanting to go into human rights law, although it wasn’t called that back then of course, was a stupid thing. But it was a gentle mockery, it was paternal. He didn’t stop letting me read his notes or talking to him about his cases. I loved sitting in his office, leaning against his shelves, and all those thick leather books. You remember what it smelled like in there? The cigars and the ink?’
‘Yeah.’
He takes a sip of his drink, sucks his teeth. ‘I thought he wanted a surrogate son. Then I realized that wasn’t all he wanted, or it wasn’t what he wanted at all.’
The rec room feels quiet, clinical, in a way it didn’t five minutes ago in the streaming sun. I rest the crown of my head on the glass and close my eyes.
‘The books about Ancient Greece, the prints of classical statues, were one thing,’ Stuart continues, ‘but the way he looked at me, Ruth, the way he’d sit back in his chair and let his eyes wander up and down. He was a connoisseur, after all, he liked to be surrounded with nice things and I was one of them. Do you remember the fashions back then? The tight jeans, the tiny shorts? It was easy to tell when a man was looking, and I gave him a lot to look at. I thought about what I’d do when he finally made a move on me. I thought, Yeah, sure. I’ll do what he wants, what’s it to me, why is it worse than anything else? I was used to it anyway, I know how I looked back then. You know too, you drew me.’
I picture him with his lighter in his hand, flicking it round and round. It’s dizzying.
‘It was a fortnight after what happened with Camille – I guess in hindsight maybe my head wasn’t quite right. You were back at school but I wasn’t due at Cambridge until late September. I thought he might like the drawing – I mean, it wasn’t a bad portrait,’ he laughs, ‘it got the gist across anyway. So the next time I was in his office, propped up against his desk in my tight shorts, on display, I let the drawing slip from a pile of books. And he looked at it and then at me. I could see everything on his face. His desire, his fear and horror, his anger.
‘I’ve had a lot of time to think about it, Ruth, about why he reacted the way he did. It was fine when it was something unspoken, when he had the power, when he watched me and I let myself be watched, pretended not to know he would have happily bent me over his desk, but the picture, and my presentation of it, the way I broke the unspoken rules, his rules – it was like I had sunk down on my knees for him, it was that obscene.’
Someone walks past the closed door behind me and I feel my neck spasm. In the garden, two smokers share a light, cupping their hands against the breeze that scuttles leaves around their feet.
‘Then he got control of himself again,’ Stuart recounts, ‘and turned his smile cold, contemptuous. You know how he could be, you know that more than me. I’m not going to recommend you to any law firms, he said. In fact, I’m going to write to the law department at Cambridge myself to dissuade them from taking you too.
‘Why? I demanded, and I remember,’ Stuart makes a sound in his throat, ‘I remember my voice broke when I said that. And I remember your father’s voice was so even when he replied, so . . . detached. Because of your politics, because you think you can worm your way into my family through my daughter, because someone like you doesn’t belong in law. Because he felt like I had exposed him, Ruth, because he could do all of that. And that was bad enough, being told I was blacklisted for nothing I had done, for a drawing you made. But he also said something to my father, made an implication, and that’s when he kicked the shit out of me. It would have been pointless to tell Dad I wasn’t like that; I could have fucked a girl in front of him and he wouldn’t care. I was soft, I had long hair and floppy clothes, I wanted to be an academic, I wanted to save the world.’
‘My dad didn’t have that kind of power, he couldn’t have really blacklisted you,’ I say, as if I don’t care about what else he’s told me, as if I’m not sweating and dry-mouthed, feverishly flicking through memories in my mind like an old flip-book, trying to put the story together in reverse.
‘It was an old boys’ club back then, everything was. It was hard enough getting them to switch my subject at the last minute before your father had a chance to do what he promised he would, I had to beg the college for it. University was a joke, it was all about who you knew and who your daddy was, what job they could get you in the city. Power, old money, new money pretending to be old money.’
‘I didn’t know.’
‘You never suspected? Not once?’
‘No.’
‘How did you fall out, you and him?’
‘I – I saw him at a party in London, an event at a gallery, when I was pregnant with the twins. He didn’t want to see me there.’ Or for me to see him? That’s what I had suspected. ‘We argued, he said some horrible things about my pregnancy.’
‘Was he with someone?’
‘No, I don’t know. A client. An older client, not that.’
‘Were you with someone?’
‘Alex was at home with Maeve.’
‘That wasn’t what I meant.’
‘I know what you meant,’ I spit back, thinking of everything Stuart knows about me, what I’ve told, what I’ve given away. ‘I was there by myself.’
‘I saw him watching you at Maeve’s christening, your dad,’ Stuart says. ‘I was watching you at Maeve’s christening.’
‘What’s that supposed to mean?’
‘Sometimes, when you talk to women, you light up, you . . . flirt. Repression and shame are powerful things. When we hate something about ourselves we throw it on someone else, we make an enemy, an other.’
The friend I had run into at the gallery. My father looking over and seeing us together. The way he talked about me leaving Alex. I squeeze my eyes shut and try to remember. Did I only assume he was upset about the pregnancy, did I put those words in his mouth? Was that moment just a catalyst for everything to come to a head – the way he had treated me for so many years, his coldness, the scorn that sometimes looked like fear?
He had been so happy at my wedding, I remember that. Your mother would be proud of you, he had said at the reception, his cheeks flushed red with wine. I had set aside two bottles of the best just for him.
‘I think that might be why he hated you,’ Stuart says, after a pause. ‘Because he thought you were the same.’
‘I’m hardly the same as him. If anyone’s preying on teenagers it’s you.’
‘I mean that neither of you are straight, a
re you?’
‘It’s you who’s like him, taking advantage—’
‘It’s been painful for me – it was painful for me, to see you lie to yourself like that, to see those similarities between you both.’
‘And that’s why you left? That’s what you’re trying to say?’ I scoff, frantically batting aside his accusations. ‘No, if I had any small part to do with you deciding to go gallivanting round the world, it was because you knew I’d never want you the way you wanted me. And you know what else? I used to think we were close at university because I trusted you, but I think it might have been fear’ – or shame, but the two go hand in hand, don’t they – ‘and I suspect you found ways of stoking it. I was afraid you would tell someone, that you knew about me, and that’s why I kept you close – how did you know, anyway?’
‘I saw you two in the woods, you and Camille. But Ruth—’
‘Of course, a voyeur from the start.’ I push myself away from the windowsill and shake my head at my reflection. ‘I think you think I should thank you for telling me this about my dad, and for blowing up my family like you did this summer.’
‘Ruth—’
‘I’m not finished. What I was going to say is that I think you got lost out there, that you’re too used to war and destruction. The world doesn’t look right to you unless it’s been torn apart.’
‘No.’
‘Like Maeve. You saw how good she was and you wanted to ruin that, to bring her down with you.’
‘It’s the opposite actually. What I’ve been through – seen – has made me search for beauty, appreciate goodness where I find it. What Maeve and I had—’
‘Jesus Christ, listen to yourself. You talk of love, love, but all you’ve done is mess her around, and take what you want. You have no idea the damage you’ve done to her and you never will.’ I turn my back to the window. ‘I guess I should thank you though for making it clear today that it wasn’t about love at all, but some kind of sick revenge. The sins of the father being visited on the daughter.’