by Sarah Jasmon
‘How old are you here?’ She turned it round so Victoria could see.
‘That was when we were in Greece, so I’d be about six, and Seth’s eight. We were living on Andros.’ Victoria reached out a hand to take the photograph. ‘It’s a Cycladic island.’ She gave it back.
It’s all Greek to me. Helen laughed inwardly at her silent joke, and put the photo down.
‘Was it a holiday?’
‘No.’
Helen waited to Victoria to go on, but she’d come to a stop, staring ahead, as if her mind was in another country.
‘So, how long were you there for?’
Victoria gazed blankly at her as if she didn’t know who she was. After a moment, she gave her head a shake.
‘Five, six months. Dunno.’ She shuffled through the prints she was holding. ‘It was the last time I saw my dad, actually.’
The words were casual, as if seeing your dad for the last time was a perfectly normal thing to happen, but they couldn’t cover up the tightness of her voice. Helen glanced up at the drummer on the wall, wanting to ask for details but not sure how to start. Then Victoria threw the handful of snaps to one side and reached in the box for more before continuing.
‘We went there with the band, they were working on an album.’ She discarded that pile as well, and grabbed for more. ‘My dad and the other guys were in this villa with a pool, and Alice, me and Seth had a sort of donkey hut.’ She glanced up. ‘Converted, you know, we didn’t sleep in hay. It was brilliant, actually. We had this beach all to ourselves and there were these old ladies on donkeys and they gave us figs and stuff.’ Her voice tailed off. ‘Anyway. We were there, and my Uncle Piet had come out to join us. Then one night there was a massive row.’ She stopped sorting and leaned back against the bed, her eyes closed. ‘Me and Seth, we got up to see what was going on. They were all off their heads, chucking stuff in the pool. And in the morning, they were gone.’
Again, Helen waited for her to carry on, but there was silence. She couldn’t leave it like that. Helen leaned closer and prompted her.
‘Was this when your dad went off to South America?’
There was a pause.
‘Yeah, round about.’ Victoria sat staring at the photos in her hand as if she wasn’t sure where they’d come from. She gave her head an impatient shake and carried on. ‘Though we didn’t know about it at the time, of course. We found Alice in the villa, but we couldn’t wake her up.’
The room seemed to be holding its breath along with Helen. She could feel the heat as the two blond children walked hand in hand through an empty courtyard, a dry wind blowing through the surrounding trees. It made her think of Mary Lennox after the cholera.
‘You must have been terrified.’ Her voice came out as a whisper, but Victoria’s reply was matter-of-fact enough to bring her back to the bedroom.
‘Not really. There was a house down the hill, an old Greek farmer and his wife. They took us in.’
‘And didn’t ask any questions?’
‘They didn’t speak English. Seth showed them Piet’s address, and they fed us bread and olives until he turned up and brought us all back to England.’
Helen picked the photo of Seth and Victoria up again. Behind them, the tangle of shrubbery seemed to shift, sending out a sharp, exotic fragrance. Momentarily, she tasted the sharp juiciness of an olive, felt the heat of the sun against her back. The children looked back at her, their gaze unwavering. No wonder Victoria was a bit odd about her mother. She tried to come up with something neutral by way of response.
‘It’s like something out of a novel.’
‘Better than this Russian crap.’ Victoria leaned sideways to grab at War and Peace, lying forgotten on the bed, and held it away as Helen tried to reach for it. Helen lunged at her and they toppled over, Victoria squirming until she was free and scrambling on to the bed. Helen began to make a half-hearted chase but let it go. The photos were more interesting. Victoria came back to join her, and plucked one out of the spread on the floor.
‘Here’s a picture of him, anyway.’
Helen leaned across.
‘Your dad?’
She glanced up at the poster on the wall again before studying the photo. It was definitely him, minus the sideburns. He was wearing a long sheepskin coat, his hair curly and touching his shoulders, like Seth’s did now. On his face was a broad grin, and each arm was wrapped around the shoulders of a beautiful woman. Helen pointed at one of them.
‘Alice?’ She didn’t need to ask. Alice was gazing up, a thick fringe shadowing her eyes, but her mouth full and joyous.
‘Yeah.’ Victoria held out another picture. ‘And here he is again. Daddy Jakob with Uncle Piet.’
Jakob was withdrawing from this shot, his eyes narrowed against the sun. Piet was taller than his brother, leaner, propped against a wall, head tilted towards the camera. Something about him seemed familiar. Helen held the photo away, trying to recall. He should be wearing a cowboy hat. She searched around Victoria’s walls.
‘He’s exactly like him,’ she said, pointing at the poster of James Dean, the shy cowboy avoiding eye contact.
‘You reckon?’ Victoria sounded sceptical. ‘He’s not much like him now.’ She took the photo back and held it up to compare it to the film poster. ‘Must be the way he’s standing.’
She flicked the photo into the box, before suddenly bending to scoop up a huge armful, pressing them down into the box.
‘Careful!’ Helen tried to help. ‘You’re going to crease them.’
‘And that would matter why?’ Victoria turned and left the room. For a while Helen stayed there, cross-legged, re-arranging the pictures in the box so that they all lay flat. There were shots of landscapes, buildings, more and more faces. She stopped at one showing a group of young men on banquette seating arranged around a table. One of them was Victoria’s dad. The other faces were vaguely familiar, but she couldn’t pin down why. One smiled, another had been caught mid-grimace. They had long hair, ruffled shirts printed in floral designs, cigarette smoke coiling up in the air before them. A woman’s hand rested on the table, but her body was out of the shot. Helen gazed up at the poster of the drummer. Where was he now?
She became aware of the silence in the house. She’d felt that she should wait until Victoria came back, but now she wasn’t sure. After returning the rest of the photos to the box, she stood up and went over to the window. A mirror had been propped at one side and Helen bent to look into it. There was a scatter of cosmetics in front of it, and she spent some minutes smudging kohl under her eyes. The faces in the posters on the walls seemed to burn into her, asking what she thought she was doing, and she leaned in again and rubbed it off, until it was the faintest grey shadow. She wasn’t sure she liked how the room felt any more.
Downstairs, the cottage was empty. She crossed through the living room and stopped inside the kitchen door. There was no sound other than the drip of water from the tap, but through the window she could just see the back of Victoria’s head. Holding her breath, she edged around the table, careful to keep out of view.
Alice was sitting in a chair on the patch of gravel that widened out to where the grass began. Her hair and face were wet from the rain, her blouse a clinging second skin. Victoria was standing behind the chair, massaging Alice’s shoulders, but they didn’t seem to be talking. The sun was out now, a swathe of light catching the two of them against the red brick of the wall. The colours around them, on them, were rich and somehow golden. Helen felt her throat close up again. Poor Alice. She was so beautiful, so … other. A picture came into her mind of her own mother, fussing about things being tidy, always asking what she, Helen, had been doing. Victoria was so lucky.
Helen swiped a hand across her eyes, wishing she could go and join them. It would be like breaking through a spider’s web, though. She felt too large, too solid, the sort of clodhopping peasant who crashed into fairy stories and got turned into stone. Instead, she retreated into the sitting room
but the front door was locked and there was no sign of the key. The windows were no use to her either, their frames sealed with many years’ worth of thick, white paint. For a brief second she felt a lack of air, the walls closing around her in a dizzy rush. The twins’ voices, floating down the stairs, came from another planet. She tried to think. She could join the twins. She could go back up to Victoria’s room. She could wait where she was, pretending to read or something. Or she could go home, giving a casual wave as she passed by, as if this sort of thing happened every day. There was only one option, really, and she made her way with slow steps back to the kitchen. It turned out that she needn’t have worried. As she sidled down the side of the cottage towards the path, one hand lifted, neither Victoria nor Alice noticed her go.
Chapter Eight
The feeling of being an intruder lingered overnight, and Helen found herself searching for things to do around the house. As she kicked mess into corners and behind furniture, she went over the previous afternoon, replaying the conversation to work out what had happened. Perhaps she’d asked too many questions. She tried taking pictures down from the sitting room walls with the vague idea of making the house more Dover-like, but there was nothing to put up in their place, and the pale squares they left behind made the rest of the walls seem dirty. She hung them back up in a different order, but they were still boring. One day she’d live somewhere beautiful, with colour and clutter and shelves crammed with interesting things. Dissatisfied, she drifted back to the kitchen. The dirty washing-up water still hadn’t gone down the drain. She’d have to tell her dad.
As if on cue, Mick came out from the back of the garage. She watched him shamble along the path to the house and waited for the kitchen door to swing open.
‘Dad, the sink’s blocked.’
Mick didn’t answer, but sank down on a chair and started to roll a cigarette. He seemed tired, the pouches heavy under his eyes and rough stubble covering his chin. The ribbing around the V of his jumper was loose, wool unravelling in a curly spring. Helen felt a twist of love for him in her stomach. It wasn’t fair. Mum had been so mean, always going on about what he didn’t do. She’d make it up to him somehow. Leaving the sink, she crossed to the chair on the other side of the table.
‘Have you been doing something to the boat?’
He lit up; closed his eyes.
‘It’s too much for one person.’ His eyes stayed closed. ‘I’ve missed my time.’
‘No you haven’t.’ She tried to remember the names of friends he’d had, people he could contact. ‘How about Ken? You know, he used to be interested in it.’
‘Too busy with his wife and kids.’ Mick blew out a gush of smoke and opened his eyes to study the glowing end of the roll-up. ‘There’s not enough maintenance done on the canal, anyway. The locks are falling apart, the bottom’s filling up. Won’t be anywhere left to take the boat at this rate.’
‘You could always go to sea.’ Helen forced a smile into her voice. ‘I’ll get you a captain’s hat for Christmas.’
They sat in silence for a while, the weight of Mick’s thoughts an almost palpable mass. Helen made a decision.
‘I’ll be down at the cottage.’
Mick lifted a hand slightly as if in assent. As she went outside and through the gate, her feet picked up speed, lightened by relief at her escape.
The hedges bordering the lane seemed to have doubled in size from the rain. Even the fringe of cow parsley had lifted up into another burst of creaminess. She couldn’t help but feel the optimism. As she reached the end, the sight of the canal made her stop in her tracks. The morning sun had risen into a perfectly clear sky, and the surface of the water was as smooth as she’d ever seen it. It reflected back the blueness without even the hint of a ripple, and the inverted trees stretched downwards with every detail as sharp in the mirror image as it was in the original. Maybe the canal wasn’t really a channel of water, dug out by humans; perhaps it was a portal, the upside-down world as real as the one she stood in.
The thought of what the Helen below ground might be doing took her round the corner and into the garden. She couldn’t remember why she’d been worried about coming back. There was a book lying on the grass beneath the apple tree, and she went over to pick it up. Little Women. A tiny unripe apple landed on her head.
‘About time you got here. I dropped that ages ago.’
Victoria was sprawling along the length of the lowest branch, one hand out towards her. Helen stopped, caught between her private story and the reality of Victoria being so normal. She’d momentarily forgotten why she was bothered about turning up, and the sense of something unfinished floated around her like a mote in the sun before disappearing in among the shade of the branches. She made a show of studying the cover.
‘I don’t think this is on the list.’
‘I know.’ Victoria yawned. ‘I needed something easy to make up for that other one you made me read.’
‘I’ve nearly finished War and Peace. You can have that.’
Victoria groaned as she swung herself down, arms laced around the branch, and landed neatly on the ground.
‘More Russians, that’s what I need.’ She took the book from Helen’s hand and turned it over to examine the picture of the four girls. ‘You know, I didn’t enjoy this as much as I remembered.’ She flicked through the pages, stopping to study one of the illustrations before slamming it shut. ‘It does make me want to make something, though. They’re always being creative. Painting pictures and sewing things. I feel like being an artist.’ She chucked the book back down on the grass. ‘You can be my model.’
They were in the kitchen. Helen sat as still as possible, head side on to Victoria. Seth was sitting beyond the looped-up curtain in the living room, his head bent over a large sketchbook. He frowned in concentration at whatever he was working on as she studied him, trying to decide who he resembled. Victoria, definitely, though neither of them was noticeably like Alice. She pictured the face of their father from the poster. They had the same nose, even the same jaw if you ignored the drummer’s sideburns.
Seth sat back to study what he had done, his hand tapping the tabletop. He had long fingers, the square nails blunt and oddly pleasing, and she had a rush of feeling as she noticed other details: a tiny mole below his ear, the slight difference in the colour of his skin where he shaved. What would it be like to run her fingertips along the edge of his face?
He shifted his head as if he sensed her gaze and she felt her cheeks grow warm, but his eyes travelled past her. He stood up, and came through, walking round to see Victoria’s sketch.
‘You’re making into a Roman centurion. She’s not got a right angle on her nose.’
Victoria ripped the page from her pad, screwing it up and throwing it into the corner.
‘It won’t go right. The shadowing is all wrong.’
Helen started to move, but Seth gestured to her to stay.
‘Give me the pencil. Helen’s got a really individual profile, I’ll do it.’
This time, she focused straight ahead, intensely aware of Seth’s hand inches away, tracing around the edges of her face. It was as if the line of the pencil was on her skin, riffling through her hair; he made Victoria gather it up into a chignon so her neck would be clear. He didn’t call it a chignon, but that was what she pictured, something coiled and tendrilled and elegant, nothing like her own messy attempts in the mirror at home. She imagined the pencil lines carrying on, tracing her shoulder blades, the hollow at the base of her neck. He was making her feel almost pretty.
From another world, she heard the kitchen door crash open, and the sound of footsteps approaching. In the second before her mind began to wonder who might be coming, the scene she was in floated before her eyes, perfect and untouchable. If she stayed exactly where she was, perhaps the moment would continue anyway. She willed Seth to ignore the interruption, to keep on drawing, but almost immediately he was standing, leaving. A man’s voice sounded behind her.
> ‘Afternoon, everyone. I found these two outside, does anyone want them?’
Nobody would have noticed her pause before she turned. Seth and Victoria had forgotten her anyway. The man was tall and thin, the twins clinging on to him like burrs. Seth was already doing the man thing of slapping shoulders, but Helen could tell from the length of time they left their arms resting how pleased they were to see each other.
Then Victoria leapt past with a shriek of ‘Uncle Piet!’ Her extra weight sent them all staggering back, almost into the sink. Uncle Piet, of course it was, the special uncle, the one who had found the house and paid the bills. It was a bit like seeing someone from the TV. Victoria was right, he didn’t look much like James Dean any more, but he was a cowboy nonetheless; an older, tougher cowboy, with a lined face and greying hair, his eyes slightly narrowed, even inside the house. He wore boots, faded jeans. Helen wondered if he saw it himself, played up to it. She stood by her chair, fiddling with Seth’s abandoned pencil. His sketch was lying there, and she edged it closer. What had he called her? ‘Really individual’. She wasn’t quite sure if that was praise, but the drawing did make her look nice. She pulled it away from the pad and folded it into her pocket as the others barged past her into the sitting room.
Piet went straight over to the stairs. Alice, Helen thought, up there in her secret world. Pippa tried to follow him up, and Helen watched Seth distract her with a question. Pippa swung round to whisper in Will’s ear, and they both ran out through the kitchen, followed by Seth, their voices fading into the garden. Victoria had propped herself against the windowsill and her head was bent over as she picked at the varnish on her nails. The room felt stuffy, motes hovering lazily in the light from the window. At this time of day, it came through in a wedge as the sun hit the furthest edge of the glass. Helen traced the raised fabric pattern on the arm of the chair, wondering if she could follow the others outside. She heard one of them call out, and there was the sound of a ball being hit. French cricket, the twins’ latest passion. She pushed herself up and took a step towards the door, but Victoria put out a hand to stop her.