Good Girls

by Amanda Brookfield

  Donna is very happy being near her family (we moved here ten years ago from London, where I worked at King’s after my elective). Her father is a successful property developer and they have a superb estate in Rondebosch where she and the girls are able to keep their horses and go riding. (Yours truly prefers tennis!) Living relatively far out of town, Donna is kept very busy running around after the girls – they go to school in the city and have hectic social lives!

  Well, Kat, I was just wanting to touch base. A friendly line after twenty years. It would be good to hear some news back from you if you had the time.

  By the way, how’s Eleanor these days? Say hi from me if you see her.

  Best wishes,

  Nick (Wharton)

  Eleanor read slowly, trying to hear the Nick she remembered between the sentences. There were a lot of brackets and exclamation marks, she observed wryly, her expert eye scanning the text. Far too many. Only nerves could account for it, she decided, feeling a flutter of the old bitterness that, after so many years and all that had happened, Nick Wharton should still betray such signs of jitters when placing himself across the path of her little sister.

  ‘Well? What do you think?’ Kat urged. She had finished with her repinning and was back in the beanbag, sitting cross-legged now, her knees neat bulges under her silk gown, her big blue eyes electric and staring. ‘Nice that “friendly line” bit, don’t you think?’

  ‘Yup. Very nice.’ Eleanor was trying to picture Nick in Cape Town in a white coat, being a proper doctor.

  ‘Well? Do you think I should reply?’

  ‘It’s up to you.’ Eleanor smiled. It was one thing to be wrong-footed, quite another to show it.

  ‘But what do you think?’

  Eleanor shrugged. She found it hard to believe that Kat really wanted her opinion.

  ‘If you help me,’ Kat added impishly, ‘it will take no more than a few minutes.’

  ‘Me? Help you? Why on earth would you want me to do that?’ Eleanor set down the letter and moved away from the desk. Kat was putting her through some sort of sick test, she decided, prodding her emotions to see what came out. She had forgotten the power of her sister. Kat did what she wanted and everyone else dealt with the consequences. She either didn’t care, or didn’t notice.

  ‘It would take me hours, but you’ll be able to do it in two minutes,’ Kat pleaded. ‘I’m crap with words, all dyslexic and rubbish, not like you, always so brilliant.’

  ‘Don’t be silly,’ Eleanor murmured, something inside her softening nonetheless. Nick Wharton was such water under the bridge. Ancient water. Ancient bridge.

  ‘I’ll tell you what I want to say and you make it better,’ Kat instructed, leaving her perch to turn on the computer and then pressing Eleanor into the desk chair. ‘We’ll do a cheerful potted history like he did, preferably not mentioning the jolly business of having had some of my gut removed—’

  ‘You’ve got follow-up checks and things, have you?’

  ‘Oh, heaps. Now let’s get on with it.’ Kat settled herself back into the dent she had left in the beanbag, lying on her side this time, one arm protectively cradling her lower stomach. ‘Start with “Hi Nick”.’

  Eleanor obediently began to type. Kat, for whatever reason, had decided she should help with the letter. Test or whim, it was what she wanted. ‘And you’re sure Howard won’t mind…’

  She glanced up in surprise as her sister hissed an expletive and slapped the bean bag.

  ‘What?’

  Kat was sitting bolt upright, glaring at her. Eleanor stared back in disbelief. It occurred to her that if she had needed reminders of why they didn’t see more of each other, Kat could not have been doing a better job. A long time ago, her sister had simply stopped liking her, Eleanor reflected bleakly. It was the only explanation. The sole wonder was her own difficulty in accepting the fact.

  ‘Judging me,’ Kat snapped. ‘Bossing me. Like you think you have some sort of right. Because of… well, just because you’re older.’

  ‘I never think like that.’

  ‘For your information – not that it is any of your business – Howard and I respect each other’s privacy. We give each other space. That’s one of the reasons I married him. He lets me be, unlike most other people I’ve come across… like Nick Wharton, for example. Oh my god, the man was such a limpet – it’s all coming back to me.’ Suddenly she was snorting with laughter. ‘Mr Clingy… aagh… no wonder I was horrible to him.’ She rolled her face into the beanbag, pretending to chew the fabric.

  ‘Why don’t you leave him alone then?’ Eleanor asked quietly.

  Kat stopped her rolling and sat up. ‘Because not replying might just seem rude. And where’s the harm?’

  For a moment Eleanor imagined picking up the computer keyboard and hurling it across the room. She pictured the dummy falling, its robes of lilac flapping like a giant bird, pins pinging in showers of silver rain. But it would upset Kat again and that would be bad. The kimono had fallen slightly open, affording a clearer view of the outline of the bandaging thickening her sister’s slim waist. ‘You are right,’ she conceded softly, quickly looking away, ‘so let’s get on with it. Where were we?’

  ‘Hi Nick, I think.’ Kat plucked at a thread on her gown. ‘You’re just so serious sometimes, Ellie. It can drag people down. And you’re not to be too clever for this, okay? I’ll suggest stuff and you phrase it nicely. But the letter’s from me, remember, the muggins who scraped five GCSEs, not the bright star who went to Oxford.’

  Ten minutes later, Eleanor read out the completed version, a wholly collaborative effort apart from the exclamation marks, which she had scattered liberally, telling herself that writers with sick, spoilt, bafflingly manipulative little sisters had to get their kicks where they could.

  Hi Nick,

  What a surprise to hear from you after so much time! It was great to get all your news of what sounds like the most wonderful life. I have never been to Cape Town but know of the famous Table Mountain, of course. How incredible to wake up to that every morning!

  You asked for news of me and mine, so here goes. I have also been lucky with how things turned out. I stayed as a fashion dogsbody for a few more years but gave up work after I got married in 1998. Hard to believe that was fifteen years ago! My husband Howard is a Fund Manager with Bouvray-Smith. We live near a place called Fairfield in East Sussex, not a million miles from Broughton, which perhaps you remember?! We’ve got three kids, Luke, who’s 13 and brainy like his dad, Sophie, who’s 11 going on 25(!), and Evie who’s 7 and probably most like me! We are also lucky enough to have a lovely house and garden – lots of space for the kids to run around in. We even have a pool, though the English weather probably means we don’t use it quite as much as you do yours! Howard has to commute, which is a pain, but apart from that life is pretty good. I do a bit of dress-making but otherwise spend my time being a mum - like your wife Donna, by the sounds of things – running around after the little darlings!

  Well, Nick, thanks for your email. I can’t imagine you forty years old, I must say. Though of course it will be my turn in a few more years!

  Eleanor is visiting at the moment and says hi back.

  Take care and all the best for the next forty!

  Kat (Gallagher these days, but I still use Keating sometimes. Was that how you tracked me down?)

  ‘By the way, you know if you end with a question he’s more likely to write back.’

  ‘Is he?’

  ‘It’s human nature.’

  ‘Is it?’

  ‘Do you want him to write back?’

  ‘Dunno.’ Kat frowned. ‘Oh, I guess not. Take it out then.’

  ‘Out it goes.’ Eleanor deleted the second sentence in the bracket.

  ‘Oh, and add a kiss please. Just one. Lower case. Everybody kisses everybody these days after all, don’t they? A kiss means literally nothing.’

  ‘Does it?’ Eleanor murmured, adding one small cross next to Kat’
s name and resisting the urge to point out that Nick’s signing off had been much more formal. Kat could still have any man she wanted, she reflected, with a twist of weary pride. Age, motherhood, illness made no difference. One snap of her little sister’s fingers and men fell like nine-pins. They always had. They always would.

  An hour and a half later, after tea and some delicious ginger biscuits reputedly made by Hannah the babysitter, they were on the doorstep, conducting farewells in the glare of Eleanor’s taxi headlights. Kat had by then showered and changed into a grey glitter-flecked mohair jumper, loose black trousers and bright red Converse trainers. The jumper shone in the light, catching the sparkle in her eyes. She looked radiant, transformed.

  ‘Would you come again,’ she said suddenly, ‘if I asked?’

  ‘Of course. Whenever. If you ask.’ Eleanor bounced the phrase back casually, knowing Kat was laying down her terms. She had in fact reached a state of longing to be gone, to be on her own. Ill or not, her sister was such hard work, so ready to fight, so good at making her feel there was something she needed to apologise for, if only she could figure out what it was.

  ‘Okay. Cool.’

  ‘Or you could come and see me in London,’ Eleanor offered, ‘take a break from Howard and the kids. We could have lunch or something.’

  ‘Oh yes, we must,’ Kat cried, as if she might even mean it, when they both knew she didn’t.

  Ten minutes into Eleanor’s train journey, a text came through from Megan.

  You okay? Long time no hear. xx

  Eleanor gripped her phone, seeing again her friend’s husband’s big, square, dismayed face peering at her over the mangled sheets of her bed linen three weeks before. The morning mortification had been mutual. Billy had loped off like a whipped dog and she had stumbled to the toilet to throw up with a violence that she knew was as much about self-abhorrence as her hangover. The Trevor Downs commission had come through on the very same day; a flimsy lifeline, it had felt like, the pretext she needed to clean her act up and start again.

  Eleanor stared at the message. She was pretty sure Billy wouldn’t say anything, but that didn’t make it any better or easier. Slowly she typed back:

  Fine. Mad busy. In touch soon. xx

  Megan would also have noticed her recent lack of communication on social media, she knew. Shutting the world out was a lot easier, she was discovering. Fewer mistakes got made. Less money got spent. Aloneness was the key.

  Eleanor rested her forehead against the cold grimy train window, her mind drifting back to Kat’s bullishness over Nick’s email. Yet it had been easy in the end. Words pinging into an inbox on another continent. Sunny sentences. The past was the past after all, a foreign country, as someone a lot wiser than her had once pointed out.

  She closed her eyes with a sigh. Human lives were so messy, that was the trouble. It all began simply enough: one got born, but then stuff started to happen, blocking pathways, burying love and truth till only a fraction of anything made sense.

  2

  Nick Wharton logged into his work email. There was always lots to attend to. Through the window in front of him he could see his two daughters splashing in the pool, trying to push each other off the big inflatable dolphin, a toy owned and played with for so long it was a wonder it stayed afloat. The house was solidly built, double-glazed against the winds that could pick up suddenly across the Cape. It reduced his daughters’ joyful shrieks to muffles, contributing to a sense of cocooned solitariness that Nick found he couldn’t quite enjoy in spite of having sought it out. Donna was under the parasol at the table, busy on her iPad, a bottle of one of her expensive mineral waters parked in an ice bucket beside a tall lead crystal glass. She had made the most of the hot January weather by swimming and was wearing a white muslin kaftan recently bought from one of her favourite designer outlets in the Waterfront mall. It looked fantastic against her olive skin and with the black lines of her bikini peeking through the mesh.

  Bored by the correspondence most in need of attention, Nick scrolled back to the emails he had been firing off to old acquaintances in the weeks since his milestone birthday and the various replies. It had been enjoyable as well as reassuring to find how easy it was to track people down and to hear news of their busy lives. It had also made him realise, a little wistfully, how far he had moved away from his early doctoring days in England. Coming across what Kat Keating had written back the weekend before, he paused, skimming again through the sentences. The tone was typical Kat, he decided – exuberant but faintly dismissive, skating over the surface of things, not wanting to get stuck in. She had seemed such an alluring locked box of a girl, but when you got close it was like there was nothing to come out, or at least nothing she was prepared to give. And, of course, someone like that had landed squarely on her feet, back in the Home Counties, a rich husband in tow. He would have expected no less. A golden couple with a swanky country house. No wonder the email was so light, so watertight, so insouciant.

  Through the window, Donna caught his eye and held up her arm to tap the silver bracelet-watch on her wrist. The pool was now empty, the dolphin abandoned, bobbing in a far corner on a jet from the filter. It was time for him to take Natalie to her dance class. His wife had her sunglasses on, but Nick didn’t need to see her expression to know she was irritated. He held up his hand, spreading the fingers to indicate five minutes, and moved on through the correspondence to another reply, a very funny one this time, from a man with whom he had spent many happy youthful hours – good old Peter Whycliffe, erstwhile eccentric student, now a professor of cardiology, making life-and-death decisions in an Oxford hospital. It seemed ridiculous they had ever lost touch.

  Nick began to type a funny letter back until a tapping made him look up again.

  Donna had taken her sunglasses off and was using them to rap on the window. ‘Now,’ she mouthed at him, stretching her beautiful curved Cupid’s bow lips into an angry O, her blue eyes flashing.

  Nick nodded, leaving his desk and putting his head out into the hall to call upstairs. ‘Nat? Are you ready?’

  ‘Nearly,’ she yelled. There was the squeak of bare feet scampering along the wooden landing floor, followed by the slam of a door. ‘Sash has taken my shoes.’

  ‘Have not!’ yelped her younger sister.

  ‘Sort it, you two,’ Nick warned, adding, ‘Five minutes, tops.’

  He turned back to his laptop, reluctantly closing down the tabs. When he glanced up, his eldest daughter was lolling in the doorway, her ballet kitbag slung over one shoulder. Noting his air of preoccupation, she shot him a look of wary puzzlement.

  ‘What? We’re not that late, are we?’

  Nick closed the lid of his computer. ‘No, we are not. And you’re a good girl.’ He kissed her head and picked up the ballet bag, whistling and tossing his keys as they made their way out to the car.

  3

  October 1992

  The mushroom was the size of a dinner plate. Behind it, blackening its profile, stretched the steely dawn sky, the sun a brushstroke of pink across its middle. Eleanor blinked in wonderment, her sleepy brain conjuring images of an Alice in Wonderland-style dinner party, attendants seated round the mushroom’s flat, sleek ebony top. Beside her, Kat started humming softly. She was barefoot, up to her ankles in the dew-damp grass, her party dress testifying to another all-nighter. Gold strappy shoes dangled carelessly from the middle finger of her left hand.

  ‘Still pissed off I got you out of bed?’

  ‘I was awake anyway.’

  ‘Yeah, right.’

  They both stared at the mushroom. It was Kat’s idea of a gift, Eleanor guessed, an effort to be nice on her last morning at home.

  ‘It could be breakfast, I thought.’ Kat swung the shoes.

  ‘Eat it, you mean?’

  ‘Yes, Dumbo.’ She bulged her tongue into her lower lip. She looked exhausted, wild-eyed, wild-haired, glorious. The dress she was wearing was one of the ones she had lately started running up
herself, using their mother’s old sewing box and Singer machine – a tight red bodice sprouting a concoction of silk and lace panels in electric colours. From somewhere in the tangle of hair behind her left ear, she extracted a flattened roll-up, slipping it between her lips but making no move to light it.

  ‘For all we know it could be poisonous.’

  ‘It’s not.’

  ‘And how would you know?’

  ‘Because I do.’

  ‘You shouldn’t smoke.’

  ‘Fuck off.’

  Eleanor turned to face her younger sister, arms folded, her gaze steady. The hostility was old hat now, she had got used to it. ‘And where were you last night?’

  ‘What’s it to you?’ Kat smiled slyly, displaying the small gap between her front teeth that, for some reason Eleanor could never fathom, made her look cute.

  ‘I hope you are careful?’

  Kat rolled her eyes, feigning shock. ‘Oh yes, we must be careful, mustn’t we. Like you would know so much about that, wouldn’t you, Miss Big-Brain? You’re not Mum, so don’t try to be,’ she added nastily. ‘And if you want to tell Dad then go right ahead.’

  ‘You know I wouldn’t tell Dad,’ Eleanor murmured. In just a few hours, she was going away to start university, starting her life it felt like. Kat could be Kat – wild and bad – without her having to worry about it. The mighty mushroom was auspicious for her, Eleanor decided. Her stomach cramped with sudden joy and terror at the prospect of heaving the old suitcase her father had dug out of the cellar into the trunk of her English teacher’s mini and journeying to the sandy-stoned college that had, miraculously, offered her the chance to spend three years doing nothing but reading and writing about English literature. There would be some Anglo-Saxon to study too, Miss Zaphron had told her – stories about someone called Bear-Wolf and a green knight – a dreamy-eyed look had come into her English teacher’s eyes as she described them.