Yes, My Darling Daughter

by Margaret Leroy

  Rage grabs me by the throat. I want to shake her, to slap her, anything to make that cold look go away.

  She pushes the plate to the other side of the table, moving it carefully, not in a rush of anger, but very controlled and deliberate. She turns her back to me.

  “Stop it. Just stop it.” I’m shouting at her. I can’t help myself. My voice is too loud for the room, loud enough to shatter something. “Jesus, Sylvie. I’ve had enough. Just stop it, for God’s sake, will you?”

  She sits quite still at the table, with her back to me. She presses her hands to her ears.

  If I stay, I’ll hit her.

  I go to the bathroom, slam and lock the door. I sit on the edge of the bath, rigid, my fists clenched, my nails driving into my palms. I can feel the pounding of every pulse in my body. I sit there for a long time, making myself take great big breaths, sucking the air deep into my lungs like somebody pulled from the sea. Gradually my heart slows and the anger seeps away.

  I’m aware of the pain again. It’s worse now, drilling into my jaw. I find two Nurofen at the back of the bathroom cabinet. But my throat is tight, they’re hard to swallow. I’ve sucked off all the coating before I get them down. They leave a bitter taste.

  In the living room, Sylvie is on the floor again, busy with her Noah’s ark, humming softly to herself, as though none of this had happened.

  “I’ll make you some toast,” I tell her.

  She doesn’t look up.

  “With Marmite?” she says.

  “Of course. If that’s what you’d like.”

  I make her the toast, put milk in her cup. I eat a few mouthfuls of crumble, though my appetite has gone. I clear the table.

  “Shall we watch television?”

  She nods. We sit together on the sofa, and she curls in close to me, taking neat bites of her toast. If she drops a crumb, she licks her finger and dabs at the crumb and sucks it from her fingertip. It’s a wildlife program, about otters in a stream in the Scottish Highlands. She loves the otters, laughs at their quick, lithe bodies, the way they slide across the rocks as sleek and easy as water. As we sit there close together, it feels happy again between us, the bad scene just a memory, faint as the slight bitter taste in my mouth.

  “Sweetheart, I’m sorry I shouted at you,” I tell her. “I don’t feel well. My tooth hurts.”

  She’s nestled in the crook of my arm. She looks up at me. “Which one, Grace?” she says.

  “It’s here.” I point to the sore place. “I’ll have to go to the dentist. He’ll probably take it out.”

  She reaches across and rests her hand against the side of my face.

  “There,” she says.

  The tenderness in the gesture melts me. I hug her to me, bury my face in her hair, in her smell of lemons and warm wool. She lets herself be held.

  9

  THE RECEPTIONIST GREETS me. She’s married to one of the dentists who work here. She has a faded prettiness and bleached, disheveled hair.

  “Toothache?” she says.

  “I’m afraid so.”

  “Oh dear.” She shakes her head, a little disapproving. “You shouldn’t have left it so long.”

  The waiting room has a fish tank and comfortable chairs. I sit and watch the fish. They have a transparent, unnatural look, like embryos, and their slow, threaded dance is hypnotic. There’s the faintest antiseptic smell, like that green, astringent liquid the dentist gives you to rinse with. It’s very warm, and quiet with double glazing at the windows, so all you hear is the softest hum of traffic from the street. It’s pleasant sitting doing nothing, the warmth easing into my limbs.

  There are papers and magazines on the table beside me. I look casually through the magazines, hoping for something glamorous, for opulent taffeta frocks and fetishy shoes, but they’re all just real estate journals.

  A woman comes in and speaks to the receptionist. She’s dressed discreetly, in business black with sensible pumps, but I can’t help staring at her. Her face is a mess, the skin around one eye all bruised and broken. Someone must have attacked her. Perhaps she lives with a violent man. She sits beside the fish tank, very straight and still, as though moving too much could hurt her.

  The dentist’s wife puts down her pen.

  “So how’s your little one doing, Ms. Reynolds?”

  She knows Sylvie well. I may put off my own visits, but I never miss Sylvie’s checkups.

  “Sylvie’s fine,” I tell her.

  “She’s how old now?”

  “She’s three.”

  “They’re so lovely at three.” Briefly, her face softens. She has a hazy, nostalgic look. “They grow up so quickly,” she says.

  “Yes, I guess so.”

  “My two are at university now. It seems to happen so suddenly. But I’ll tell you one thing—you never, ever stop worrying. Whatever you do, you always feel you might have got it wrong.”

  “Yes. I can imagine that.”

  Her husband calls her in to help with the patient before me. She doubles as his dental nurse.

  I glance across at the woman with the bruising. I wonder about her life and the little steps, each seeming perhaps so innocuous, that have brought her to what looks like a very bad place. How easily this can happen—sleepwalking into trouble. Maybe she senses my gaze on her: she glances up, catches my eye. I feel myself flush; I turn back to the magazines, pull out a local paper, the Twickenham Post.

  I keep my eyes down, looking at the paper, pretending to be interested. There are pictures of school award ceremonies. I read my horoscope. There’s a recipe for grapefruit-and-poppy-seed cake, which sounds delicious and which I attempt to memorize. I wonder if poppy seeds are expensive and whether they stock them at Kwik Save.

  Something catches my eye then, a double-page spread in the center of the paper: “The Real Ghost Busters: Cynthia Johnson reports.” Intrigued, I start to read. It’s all written in that bland, gossipy style you find in small local newspapers.

  Things that go bump in the night are all in a day’s work for Dr. Adam Winters, of the Psychic Institute at Hampton University. Dr. Winters talked to me in the disappointingly prosaic setting of his office in the Department of Psychology. A soft-spoken man, whose gentle voice belies his evident energy and fascination with his subject, he has investigated ghosts, poltergeists and cases of telepathy. Sounds like an exciting job? “Mostly it’s quite routine,” says Dr. Winters. “For instance, if someone claims to have telepathic powers, we might set up an experiment where they have to make predictions, and we analyze the results to see if their guesses are better than chance. Basically we’re applying scientific methods of inquiry to the things that happen to people that they can’t explain . . .”

  There’s a photo of Adam Winters with the article. It’s a grainy photo, you can’t really see him clearly. He’s lean and dark, and his chin is shadowed with stubble, and he has a startled air, like someone has just called his name. I contemplate the photo for a moment. I decide he’s the kind of man who’d corner you at a party and stand too close and talk at length about some obsession of his—someone who’d undoubtedly think that I was rather frivolous. Then I smile at myself for conjuring up this entire persona for him.

  I can hear the edgy, mosquito whine of a drill from one of the surgeries. I don’t want to think about it. I focus on the article, which has lots of stories of local ghosts. There’s a gallery at Hampton Court that’s haunted by the ghost of Catherine Howard, whom Henry VIII beheaded: dogs won’t go over the threshold. Adam Winters and his colleagues visit the sites of the hauntings and measure fluctuations in electromagnetic fields.

  I ask him if he believes in ghosts, but he’s guarded and noncommittal. He tells me, “A scientist should never say that anything is impossible . . .”

  I look up as the woman in the black business suit is called in. I notice how stiffly she moves, her body as fragile as eggshell. Then the door bangs shut behind her and I’m alone in the room.

  I turn back to the
paper, skim through the rest of the article. I’m about to turn the page when the last few lines spring out at me as though they are illuminated.

  But Dr. Winters doesn’t confine his researches to ghostly apparitions. One of the cases he’s currently investigating is that of four-year-old Kevin Smith (not his real name). Kevin wakes sobbing every night and says he wants to go home, and sometimes he talks about a place where he says he used to live. His mother wonders if Kevin is remembering a previous life . . .

  The room tilts. I can feel my heart, its rapid, jittery beat.

  I put it to Dr. Winters that many children live in a fantasy world. “Of course,” he says. “And that’s why we have to look at these cases very carefully. In fact, accounts of children apparently remembering past lives are actually quite common, though most of them come from cultures which have a belief in reincarnation, like the Druze of Lebanon.” And he tells me there are psychiatrists who claim to use past life regression to heal physical symptoms and phobias.

  I ask him what he thinks of all this. “I’ve never investigated a past life case that I found completely convincing,” he tells me. “But there’s a U.S. psychiatrist, Dr. Ian Stevenson, who devoted his life to exploring this phenomenon—and some of his cases are really very persuasive . . .”

  I jump as my dentist’s door swings back. An elderly man in a drab gray coat comes out. He’s touching his face with his fingers, as though to check that it’s still there. The dentist’s wife takes his credit card. I read hungrily on, my heart juddering.

  So what does Dr. Winters make of Kevin? He’s diplomatic: he gives me a guarded smile. “As a scientist, I never say never,” he tells me.

  Have you had an experience that you can’t explain? Dr. Winters would love to hear from you. You can contact him at this e-mail address . . .

  I grab my bag and scrabble around for a pen.

  “Ms. Reynolds, could you come in now?”

  The dentist is standing at the door of his surgery. I fold up the paper and tuck it under the magazines.

  I get in the chair, and the dentist pokes around in my mouth. He’s a bony, lugubrious, kindly man. He allows himself a melodramatic sigh.

  “And when did you last come to see me?” he says.

  “I can’t remember exactly. I’m afraid it’s quite a while.”

  He shakes his head, as though wearily resigned to human weakness.

  “I’ll see what I can do,” he says mournfully. “But in the end we’ll probably have to extract it.”

  He drills my tooth, puts in a filling, prescribes some antibiotics.

  “To be honest, I really don’t know if this is going to work,” he says. “You should make an appointment for eight weeks’ time. But any trouble, you come back sooner, okay? Any twinges.”

  I promise that I will.

  I go back into the waiting room. The dentist’s wife follows. If she wasn’t here, I might steal the Twickenham Post. The work will cost a lot. I arrange to pay in installments. She fixes my next appointment.

  Outside, I’m amazed that everything is just the same as it always was—the lumbering buses, the crowd of pedestrians jostling at the traffic lights—all solid, vivid, predictable, just as they were before.

  10

  IT’S A COLD, dreary December—dark days, with a raw, searching wind that often has flakes of snow in it, and sometimes a rain that looks like water but feels like ice on your skin. In our garden, the mulberry branches are bare, and the lawn is muddy and sodden, and leaves from the trees in the Kwik Save car park drift up against the wall, their extravagant russets and yellows darkened and dulled by the wet. It’s a struggle to keep the flat warm, with the ceilings so high and the heating so elderly and erratic. The wind sneaks in through every little crack. At night I pile my coats on top of Sylvie’s duvet.

  At the flower shop we’re stocking up for Christmas, with poinsettias and amaryllis bulbs and mistletoe, which I love for the remote, pearly glow of its berries, like something seen through clear water. And Lavinia brings in willow wands and patchwork scraps of fabric, and when the shop is quiet we sit in the room at the back and make up Christmas garlands—some of them very simple, woven from twisted twigs, and more formal, traditional ones with ribbon and berries and greenery—and sometimes I like to use colors and fabrics that nobody else would think of, bows of brown paper or shimmery Indian ribbon. When I get home, my hands still smell of juniper.

  A letter comes, with the Arbours Clinic slogan on the envelope—HELPING FAMILIES HELP THEMSELVES—and a rainbow drawn by a child. I feel a rush of hopefulness. Now someone will come to our rescue, someone will understand. I rip the envelope open. We have an appointment with Dr. Strickland at the start of January. I’m pleased. It doesn’t seem too long to wait. I worry that Sylvie’s sneakers are scruffy—I don’t want them to think that I am a neglectful parent—and I take her to buy some new shoes for the appointment, pink suede boots with laces, which I can’t really afford.

  I yearn for Dominic. I ring the house in Newgate Road, hoping to hear him on the voice mail, so hungry for something of him, just for a moment to have his voice vibrating inside me. I choose a time when Claudia should be meeting their children from school, but to my horror it’s Claudia who answers. I put the phone down rapidly, ashamed.

  And all the time I wonder about the article I read. Sometimes—most of the time—I tell myself it was nonsense, a deluded, New Agey fantasy. I remind myself that people need something to cling to—anything to protect ourselves from knowing, really knowing, that we are mortal beings. Sometimes the mind won’t let that knowledge in.

  I remember the night my mother died. I’d spent several hours that afternoon at her bedside in the hospital. She’d been doing so well with all her rehabilitation, she was starting to walk again, two months after her stroke. She’d been sitting up in bed, alert and vivid, wearing the bright new bed jacket I’d brought her, and with some lipstick on, and talking about what she’d do when they discharged her—the pelargoniums she was longing to plant. She was worried she’d missed the start of the growing season. The ward sister rang at eleven that night to say she’d died. I just said, “No, she hasn’t,” my voice quite calm and unconcerned. “Really. Don’t worry, she’s fine, I was with her this afternoon . . .” I simply didn’t believe it. When the nurse persisted, I thought it was a practical joke. I actually said that. “This is a joke, isn’t it? You’re having me on . . .” She wasn’t thrown. It can’t have been the first time this had happened to her. She kept on talking, her manner gently insistent. “Miss Reynolds, I’m really sorry, but you need to listen to me. I’m ringing from Stanton Ward. Your mother had another stroke. This time it was a massive one. It was very sudden. She wouldn’t have felt any pain . . .” But I couldn’t take it in. Just couldn’t. Like there was a door in my mind, shut fast, that couldn’t be prized open, wouldn’t let this knowledge through. And mostly I think that’s what all these beliefs are, really—doors in the mind, keeping the dark out.

  Yet sometimes I find myself thinking, Perhaps it’s true. Perhaps the soul goes on. Perhaps some of us have a memory trace—some imprint of a previous life—or a psychic link with the past. And always, just wondering that—just touching on it so lightly, even for a second or two—there’s a sense of something shifting, the present, certain, obvious world dissolving all around me, as everything I thought I knew begins to fall away.

  Sometimes I wonder about Adam Winters and kick myself that I didn’t manage to note down his e-mail address. At least I’d have a choice then. But I can’t imagine how it would be if I met him or what on earth he’d make of Sylvie and me. I simply can’t envisage it. I think of him in his university department—his glamorous career, his adulatory students, and me in my flat in Highfields, cooking chicken nuggets, reading old copies of celebrity magazines. And what might it do to Sylvie to give so much weight and attention to all the strange things that she says? Everything might get worse then. There are lots of good reasons to forget all abo
ut him. I tell myself it’s as well that I don’t know how to reach him. At least it stops me from doing anything rash.

  “Lavinia,” I say one morning. We’re working at the back of the shop. It’s a bitter day, with a light sleet thrown on the wind. “Lavinia, there was this thing I read. About the paranormal—ghosts and so on. This guy who researches into it. D’you believe in all that?”

  She’s wearing a fisherman’s sweater. Long cuffs of heavy oiled wool hang over her hands. She pushes her sleeves up, folding them over and over; her gestures are so graceful. She has many silver rings, and a cinnamon staining of nicotine on the insides of her fingers.

  Her thoughtful gray eyes rest on me. There’s a question in them.

  “It depends which bit you mean,” she says then. “I do believe in the spirit world—that there’s a spiritual dimension.” She gives a little self-deprecating shrug. “For God’s sake, Gracie, you know me.”

  I smile, and think of the house where she lives—the tarot cards, the crystals in her windows, and in her hall a low black table with beeswax candles—and when she throws one of her parties, she sticks a notice to it: “Buddhist altar: please do not put your glasses here.”

  “Sometimes . . .” she says slowly. “Sometimes I think, What if we just don’t get it? What if our dying isn’t at all as we’ve always believed it to be?”

  She comes across to me, rests her hand for a moment on my shoulder. I’m making tree decorations, diminutive pipe-cleaner angels with frocks of blackberry silk.

  “Hey, those are yummy. You clever girl . . .” She turns from me, spoons coffee into our cups, pours water from the kettle. “Why are you asking, anyway?”

  “It’s just this thing I read.”

  She waits for a while, but I don’t say anything more.

  “Mind you,” she says then, “you have to be a bit careful. People are gullible. It’s easy to start believing all kinds of crazy stuff . . .”