“Poor you,” she says. “It’s awful when they do that.” She shakes her head a little. Her earrings have a hard, metallic shine. “You feel so awful, don’t you? It’s so hard to know how to handle it.”
I nod, take a mouthful of wine. I tell myself she’s just being pleasant, but somehow I feel accused.
“My Alex was a biter,” she says. “When he was smaller, of course—you know, quite a lot younger than Sylvie is now. He once got into this total scrap with a load of other boys—it was like a rugger scrum, really, and he just piled into the melee and chose a nearby hand and bit it. I’ll always remember the look on his face when he realized it was his own . . . He was only two then, of course.”
“She’s never done it before,” I say.
Fiona has a skeptical look. I can tell she doesn’t believe me.
“I know it probably sounds a bit old-fashioned,” she says, “but I always think there’s nothing like a really good sharp smack. There are times when nothing else gets through. It can be the only language that they really understand . . .”
I murmur something, move away, go to the kitchen to top up my glass.
I stand for a moment by the window, looking out into the garden. It’s almost completely dark now, except in the sky toward the west, where there are still a few tatters of apricot light. The glass reflects the party room, the balloons and brightness and laughing people, but the shapes seem frail, ephemeral, against the gathering dark—as though only the dark has substance.
Karen comes over. I’m so happy to see her, wanting someone to pull me out of this rather mournful mood.
“Grace, I wanted a word,” she tells me.
There’s a seriousness about her, and this makes me uneasy.
I wait for her. I can tell she’s angry. Her lips are thin and hard.
“Grace, look, I don’t know how to say this, but to be honest, I don’t think this is working really, do you?”
I stare at her. I can’t speak. I can’t believe she’s saying this.
“Sylvie and Lennie,” she says. “Their friendship.” A crimson flush spreads over her face. She wraps a strand of hair behind her ear. “I’m just not sure that we should carry on. I’m not sure it’s any good for them. For either of them, really . . .”
It’s like being hit.
“But—they’re so fond of each other.” My voice is high and shaky and seems to come from somewhere else. “I mean, Sylvie adores Lennie. And most of the time they play together so well.”
She shakes her head slightly. “I thought perhaps we should give it a rest,” she tells me. “Just have a break for a bit.”
I feel a thread of panic.
“So—won’t I ever see you?”
There’s a little pause, as though this is something she wasn’t quite prepared for.
“Maybe you and I could go out for a drink together?” she says.
“But—you know I can’t. I don’t have a babysitter.”
“Yes, I’m being stupid. Don’t worry, I’m sure we can work it out,” she says, and leaves me.
21
WE’RE BUSY AT the flower shop. We’re selling tulips and daffodils and baskets of flimsy narcissi that have an elusive, polleny fragrance—the sort of flowers that people buy on impulse, especially on a day like today, with a soft, bright sky and birdsong and a breeze that smells of growing things. It’s good to be so busy, to distract me from my sense of hurt.
I see Lavinia look at me, her glance intent, bright, curious—a look that’s like a question. When the shop is briefly empty, I tell her about Karen.
“Oh, Grace, poor you. How difficult,” she says. “But friendships between mothers do have their ups and downs. Children can drive a wedge between you.”
“Yes. I guess so.”
I can’t tell her how I really feel, this sense I have that the life I’ve known—the festivals and birthdays with the other mothers and children, and the coffees in Karen’s kitchen, and all the safe, involving rituals of life with a little child—that all this is slipping away from me.
“But I’m sure you two will work it out,” says Lavinia. “I mean, you’ve been friends for ages. You must have a solid connection there.”
I feel comforted for a moment. I remind myself it wasn’t me that Karen was rejecting, it was all because of Sylvie. But then I remember her face when she said, I’m just not sure that we should carry on. That hard, closed look.
In the afternoon I have my dental appointment. My tooth is hurting again, and I know it will need to come out. I leave for the dentist at half past two. The early brightness has clouded over, and now the sky has a smeared look, like a dirty windowpane. There isn’t much traffic, and I get there early. I sit beside the fish tank in the antiseptic smell and riffle through the magazines, looking for the Twickenham Post that had the article. It isn’t there, of course. They wouldn’t keep out-of-date newspapers. I feel a relief that’s tinged with disappointment.
The dentist gives me a lot of anesthetic, and chats to me as it starts to take effect. He has a litany of complaints—the state of public transport, the rubbish in the streets. Everything is deteriorating. His voice is mournful, but his eyes shine. He relishes this kind of conversation. I reply with increasing difficulty.
Then he takes an implement that looks like a pair of pliers and starts to tug at my tooth. I have to open my mouth very wide—the tooth is right at the back. I feel he’s going to split me, that my mouth won’t stretch so far. He pulls hard. I can hear his strenuous breathing. Nothing happens.
He shakes his head.
“Your tooth doesn’t want to leave you,” he says.
He takes a different implement. I don’t feel anything, I’m totally anesthetized, but I hear a sound of splintering and cracking in my mouth. He pulls out a bit of my tooth—I can see it in his pliers, a bloody, mangled thing—and then another and another. He puts them in a paper dish. I think briefly how, in places where magic is practiced, people can put a spell on you if they have a piece of your body—a hair, a nail, a piece of broken tooth. My mouth is full of blood, which has a harsh taste, like iron.
“So what are your plans for the rest of the day, Ms. Reynolds?”
I rinse with the green antiseptic, bloodying the swirl of water in the small white sink.
“Just going back to work,” I say.
“You really ought to take some time off, put your feet up,” he says.
“I’ll be all right,” I tell him.
“Well, don’t overdo it, okay? An extraction can be quite a shock to the system.”
I assure him I won’t overdo it, and I go to pay.
“And how’s your little one?” asks the receptionist.
I have a startling, random impulse to burst into tears all over her and tell her all my troubles. I push the urge away.
“Oh, Sylvie’s fine,” I tell her, as I always do.
When I get to my car, I realize that just as the dentist predicted, I have a shaken feeling. The jab is wearing off already, leaving an ache in my jaw, a presaging of pain. I glance at myself in the rearview mirror. I look appalling. My lips have a lining of vampirish blood red, and the anesthetic has changed the shape of my face. My lips at the left of my mouth don’t quite meet, and one of my eyelids is sagging. It’s how I will look when I’m old.
I don’t feel able to drive yet. I turn on the radio, waiting to feel stronger. I sit and listen to Dido and watch the pavements and all the people who pass. A woman with her hair scraped back who’s pushing a child in a buggy: she has violet smudges of tiredness under her eyes. A young man talking on his cell phone. I have the window open an inch, I hear him as he passes, hear the threat in his voice. “However you want to look at it, however you want to see it from your point of view, that’s fine by me. All right? All right?” An elderly woman with toothless gums and lots of lavish lipstick, and two sallow boys in hoodies who have a hungry, restless air and nothing much to do.
And then I see them walking briskly along the opposite pavement
: Claudia, Charlie, Maud. Shit. I slither down in my seat so I’m completely hidden.
The children are in school uniform, their crisp gray blazers edged with dark green braid. I remember that their school is just around the corner. Claudia’s BMW is parked almost level with me on the other side of the road. As I watch, they come to their car, and she opens the trunk and they dump their things inside—the satchels, sports bags, lacrosse stick. Maud gives Charlie a playful punch, and he trips and grabs at her blazer; their faces fizz with laughter. I’m close enough to see them clearly, their gestures and expressions. There’s so much of Dominic in them. Maud has his easy assurance and his coloring; Charlie, like Sylvie, has his candid smile. Claudia turns to face them both. She’s scolding them, annoyance pulsing over her face. She has a tight, sleek calf-length skirt and high-heeled reptile-skin shoes.
I stare at her over the steering wheel, feeling the complicated emotions she always stirs up in me. I think how, when I was with him, I’d sometimes smell her perfume on him—a woman’s scent, distinct from his cologne, a spring smell, fresh as bluebells, a scent I might have chosen. Sometimes I wonder if maybe we’re rather similar, for once she was in love with him, and maybe she loved him for the things I do—his certainty, the solid feel of his body. All the old envy surges through me, envy of that whole silken texture of her life, and of all the things she can give her children that Sylvie will never have—the expensive schools with harpsichord lessons and velvet playing fields. I would like to be her, to have all these things, and to lie every night with Dominic beside me.
They get in the car, and Claudia drives away. I sit up in my seat again, I fold my arms on the steering wheel and rest my head on my arms. I wish I hadn’t seen her. It feels unlucky, today of all days, with my whole life unraveling. I feel that I’ve been cursed, as though this is deliberate, planned, and someone has stolen my broken tooth and is weaving a dark enchantment to entrap me. My jealousy sears through me, threatens to overwhelm me. I don’t know how long I sit there held in its hot, unrelenting grip. It might be just a few moments, it might be a very long time. I don’t know.
It’s the smallest thing that moves me on—the sun coming out from behind a cloud and shining through the windshield, its warmth falling full on my face. I’m grateful for the sudden heat: I raise my face to the sun. And the words that form inside me seem to come from nowhere—or not from within me, anyway. They whisper themselves through me, like a prayer. Help me. I murmur the words to myself, then speak them aloud in the quiet of my car, as though I am speaking to someone. Knowing I can’t stay here in this bitter, comfortless place, always looking behind me, longing for what I can’t have, for what I have no right to, wanting the past given back to me. Please please help me.
Perhaps it’s just a need to take action, any action, to imprint my will on the hostile pattern of things. But almost without thinking, I find myself scrabbling in my bag for my phone.
“Lavinia. I’m feeling ghastly. I think I’ll have to go to bed. I’m so sorry.”
“Of course, Grace. Was it awful?”
“Pretty much.”
“You take care of yourself, now. You just hunker down and watch some mindless television. Dentists are evil. Don’t get me on the subject . . .”
I start up the car, do a three-point turn in the road, crashing the gears and holding up the traffic. A lorry driver rages that I am a stupid fucking cow. I ignore him. There’s a small, sane, tentative voice inside me that murmurs that I’m behaving oddly and really not myself at all, that I’m disinhibited after the shock of the extraction and perhaps I shouldn’t go rushing into anything. I pay the voice no attention. I drive fast, up the hill, away from home.
22
THERE ISN’T ANYWHERE to park. Whenever I think I’ve found a space, it seems to be reserved for some important person—a head of faculty or vice-chancellor or somebody. There are warnings that cars illicitly parked will be booted and taken away. Eventually I find a corner behind some dustbins that seems to have been forgotten.
I cross a lawn where there are cherry trees, white with a froth of blossom, and go in through a side door. A notice says that all visitors must report to reception. I ignore it. I come to a foyer where there are signs to Psychology, and follow the signs down an echoey long corridor that has a sharp, sore-throat smell of Dettol. There are bulletin boards crammed with notices: the pieces of paper flap in the drafts like waving hands, demanding your attention. Students pass in casual groups—men in leather jackets, languorous girls in denim who keep flicking back their hair. No one even glances in my direction. Through the glass in a door I can see a class in progress—just like school, with rows of desks and a whiteboard, except that all the students listen with absolute attention and the tutor has a piercing in her nose.
The corridor ends at a T intersection with no signpost. I turn left and keep going, but I know I’m lost now. I must have missed an arrow. There are no more signs to Psychology. I feel as though I’m trespassing, stalking along this labyrinth of corridors. A woman walks toward me. She’s a little too old for a student, perhaps she is a lecturer. She has sprayed-on jeans and dirty-blond hair in casual, rumpled curls. She gives me a questioning look, and I’m worried that she will ask me what I’m doing. I avoid her gaze. I just keep moving on.
Then, when I’ve given up hope, I come to glass swing doors, and over them it says DEPARTMENT OF PSYCHOLOGY. I go through.
There’s a receptionist at a desk. She’s Mediterranean-looking, with smudgy dark kohl around her eyes, and she’s talking on the telephone with an air of great animation. Beside her there’s a line of chairs against a wall, some filing cabinets, and a washbasin with a paper towel dispenser.
I look around. I’m wondering where to go now. Then, just to my right, I see a door with Adam Winters’s name. I go to the door and knock, not thinking about it, just doing it. Nobody answers.
“Excuse me?” The receptionist’s voice is shrill. “Can I help you?”
I turn to her.
“I need to see Adam Winters.”
My mouth is stiff from the anesthetic. I have to force out the words.
“Okay.” She shuffles through the papers on her desk. “When’s your appointment for?”
“I don’t have an appointment. I just thought I’d drop in.”
As I talk, I cover my face with my hand. I know I must look strange.
“I’m afraid you can’t see Dr. Winters without an appointment,” she says.
“Well, perhaps he could give me an appointment when I see him.”
“No, it doesn’t work like that.”
The room lurches. I’m worried I’ll faint. I sit on one of the chairs.
She has large, moist eyes that give her the look of a troubled, solemn child.
“I need to see him,” I say again. “I want to ask him about my daughter. I mean, I won’t know if I need an appointment till we’ve talked.”
She purses her lips. “I need to see your security badge,” she says.
“I’m sorry. I don’t have one. They didn’t give me one.”
“Then you really shouldn’t be here,” she says. “Everyone has to wear one. They’re very strict about it. I’m afraid I’m going to have to ask you to leave.”
“Don’t worry,” I say. “I can just wait here. I promise I won’t be a nuisance.”
But she turns, speaks into her phone.
Almost immediately, two security men come marching through the doors. They have gray uniforms and severe expressions and are very broad and solid. They stand to either side of me, and one of them places a heavy hand on my arm.
“Madam, we want you to come with us,” he tells me.
There’s nothing I can do. I get up.
There are voices from the corridor—two men talking urgently. I think they’re disagreeing, but I can’t make out the words. Then the swing doors burst apart as the first man backs into the foyer, using his shoulder to push them, with a polystyrene cup of coffee in either hand.
You can tell at once this isn’t going to work. He stops abruptly, seeing the security men and me, and the door swings shut and catches his wrist. The coffee spills all over his arm and his sleeve.
“Fuck.”
It’s odd to see him in color. He’s scruffier than he looked in the photo, his shirtsleeves rolled, his shirt hanging out, a shadowing of stubble on his chin. He puts both coffees down on a filing cabinet, pulls some paper towels out of the dispenser. The other man hooks the door back. He’s wearing a sharply cut blazer, and he looks with distaste at the mess.
I turn to the first man.
“Dr. Winters?” I say.
He turns toward me, rapidly taking me in, looking from me to the security guards and back again. His eyes widen.
“I want to see you about my daughter,” I tell him.
He’s mechanically wiping his wrist with the towel, his eyes never leaving my face. There’s an extravagant smell of spilt coffee.
“You want to see me?” he says.
“Yes.”
“Goodness.” He has a bemused look.
The man in the blazer raises one eyebrow slightly. “It’s all right for some,” he says. “Perhaps I should change my specialty.” He goes into one of the offices.
Adam Winters turns to the security guards. “It’s okay,” he says. “She’s with me.”
They just stand there.
“You go. Really. Trust me,” he tells them. “Everything’s okay.”
They leave reluctantly, glancing over their shoulders as though I am some wild thing.
He chucks the paper towel vaguely in the direction of the wastebin, then puts down one of the coffees on the receptionist’s desk.
“Carla, there you go,” he says. “I’ll be in my office with Ms.—”
He turns to me, raises a questioning eyebrow.
“Reynolds,” I tell him. “Grace Reynolds.”
“I’ll be with Ms. Reynolds,” he says. “If I press the panic button, come right in.”
She frowns. “But you don’t have a panic button.”
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