Good Girls

by Amanda Brookfield

  Eleanor stood up stiffly, as if he had insulted her. ‘I’m afraid what Kat and I went through doesn’t fit into any kind of easy category.’ She set her still full glass on the table and picked up her bag. ‘I am sorry, Trevor, I shouldn’t have come. I’m wasting your time. I’ll speak to Julian about finding someone to take over.’

  ‘Take over?’ Trevor could feel his toes slide to the front of his brogues as he got to his feet. The shoes were too big, but Larry had bought them for him so it didn’t matter. ‘Come on now, you need to take a deep breath.’ He spoke urgently, genuinely alarmed now by the wild look in her big brown eyes. ‘I don’t care whether you have impersonated your sister or the man in the moon. I need you, Eleanor,’ he added grandly. ‘Shall we do some work? Would that help? I have had all sorts of new ideas… stories coming back to me for that middle section which we are agreed is a little thin. The time in Hollywood – the box-office flop – there is so much I can add. Quirky stuff, sad stuff, happy stuff. It brought me Larry, after all.’ He had hoped to soften her expression, to divert her a little from her own woes, but she didn’t even blink.

  Instead she was shaking her head again. ‘I can’t do it. Writing. Making sense. Of life. Your life. Anybody’s life… I am an imposter, Trevor. I am not what I seem.’

  ‘Oh, but we’re all imposters,’ Trevor cried, almost laughing because she was so much wiser than she knew, ‘It’s only the brave ones who admit it.’

  But she had stopped listening and was striding away to the front door. ‘You have been so patient,’ she said in a hollow voice, when he caught up with her. ‘Thank you for that and for being so nice. Really, truly, nice.’ She opened the door, letting in jets of icy air that flicked round their ankles.

  ‘Don’t decide anything today, okay?’ Trevor talked fast. She was poised on the front step, clutching her bag to her chest, steeling herself in a way that made him think of a parachutist crouched to jump. ‘This impersonation of yours, sweetie,’ he rushed on, ‘I suppose it was for… money?’ He tried to recall the sister whom she had showed him a picture of once on her phone, months before – a petite creature, a long loose tangle of silver-white hair, big baby-blue eyes. Impersonation in any real sense seemed improbable.

  A moment of involuntary surprise lit up Eleanor’s face. ‘Oh no, nothing like that.’

  ‘What then?’ Trevor pressed. He had assumed it was something to do with penury and forged signatures. His ghostwriter was clearly poor. It oozed out of her – the ancient tiny phone, the big scratched laptop, the racehorse figure decked in charity shop clothes.

  ‘I can’t tell you.’ Her face had gone blank again. ‘I can’t tell anyone.’

  ‘But surely nothing is that bad,’ Trevor began, but she had already launched herself off the step and was grappling with the stiff handle on his gate.

  It was three o clock by the time Nick returned from his stroll to their patch of beach. Mike and Lindy were back messing around at the water’s edge, Mike hoisting her onto his shoulders, rising from the water like a dripping leviathan, and roaring with laughter as he tipped her off sideways. Lindy was shrieking with delight, playing the game. It made Nick feel sorry for her. It almost made him feel sorry for Donna, having to watch. Almost. If she loved Mike, it must be hard.

  Nick plunged into the surf, relishing the shock of the Atlantic cold. After joshing round in the shallows for a bit, he sprint-crawled away from his neighbours and the handful of other swimmers and made for the middle of the bay. It felt good to be properly on his own. He trod water for a few minutes, admiring the big rocky arms of the cove, stretched out round him like an embrace, and then swam on until he was in the great blue canvas of the open sea. The water was chillier, choppier. He flipped over onto his back and floated, letting his limbs drift and ride the swell. The sea was a silky mattress beneath him, moulding itself to his body. Overhead, the sky was already its rich afternoon blue. It seemed to bear down; as if he was a specimen on a glass slide, Nick decided dreamily, closing his eyes.

  Nick floated. Mike and Donna. The truth had been laid bare. And though it was a truth that brought burdens, it also had manifold blessings. Already there was the new dynamic at home. He felt empowered. More surprising perhaps was that he had been enjoying work much more too. Each day that week, swinging into his reserved slot in the Queen Elizabeth car park, he had felt more positive, more hopeful. No one could deny he had forged a fantastic career. He had done well. He could remain a doctor or give it up. He had options, on all fronts.

  The current was pulling on him, little tugs. Nick began composing an imaginary email to Kat.

  Happy Christmas!

  Change your mind about January. Please. I want to meet the Keating girls!

  What harm could one drink do? It could be any drink you like! Wine. Coffee. Tea. Water…

  Nick opened his eyes. He had thought he heard something, but it was only the roar of the sea in his ears. The sky was the same. The sea felt even colder, though, and much more active. He righted himself, observing with some amazement that he had drifted well beyond the reach of the cove and was out in the open water. The figures on the beach had shrunk to the size of pin men. A couple were moving, most were lying still. One seemed to signal in his direction, but it was hard to be sure. Nick waved back anyway and started swimming. The cold had numbed him to a point, almost, of not noticing it. Sharks didn’t like the cold though, he reminded himself, which was good. The bay wasn’t that far away, perhaps a half mile, and he was a strong swimmer.

  Within a few minutes, however, Nick found himself wishing he had made more of the brunch Donna had thrown together before they left the house. It had been a busy morning – a long work phone-call about a patient, chivvying the girls because they were dilly-dallying as usual and Donna, packing for the beach, was getting irritable. He had eaten a banana. A piece of toast, a mouthful of cheese, two tomatoes. Nick forced himself to calculate the details as he ploughed his way back through the water, trying to take his mind off the mounting physical effort and a sudden raging thirst. But it was hard work and the tide fought him back, stroke for stroke.

  He fixed his eye on a jagged rock near the mouth of the cove and started counting. Ten. Thirty. Fifty. One hundred. The point seemed to get no closer. In fact it looked further away. Nick swam on against the current, keeping his head down now. He wasn’t a quitter, he reminded himself. He wasn’t even that tired yet but should probably try to pace himself. He stopped counting and switched to slower strokes, squinting in a fresh effort to make out what was going on at the beach, but it had shrunk to a slim band of white, stretched between two rocky sections of the coast.

  The sea had begun churning into frothy peaks, flinging spray and salt into his eyes, making it hard to keep them open, let alone see. Drifting for a while would be fine, he told himself. If it came to that. The cove was isolated, but Donna and the Scammells had almost certainly summoned help. It wasn’t like he was having a heart attack.

  Nick paused to look behind him, treading water, catching his breath. There had been a speedboat earlier on, but now the horizon was empty.

  On the train after leaving Trevor’s, Eleanor found a new, numb calm overtaking her. She decided to text him, put on a show of the normality she did not feel.

  Sorry for being an idiot.

  She took her time, picking a word calculated to reassure. Choosing words was one thing she did at least know how to do, she reflected darkly.

  Eleanor pressed send, but the screen on her phone went blank. She tapped it, shaking the phone urgently, panic gushing back in. The battery had died. When the train pulled into the next station, even though it was too soon, she got off. It didn’t matter where she was. She needed to move, to breathe.

  In the street, she saw a sign to Wandsworth Common and followed it, walking fast.

  Nick was flooding her head suddenly. He seemed to do that, as if it was something he controlled rather than her. Always at her weakest moments, pouncing like a need that could
not be satisfied. A thwarted first love, it was pitiful to have got so enthralled again. Eleanor summoned to mind the beautiful South African wife and two teenage daughters, the wretchedness of her deceit, allowing Nick to believe he was writing to Kat. Kat, who was dead. Kat, who had been touched – touched – by their father. Eleanor stopped in the middle of the path. A man hurrying behind her steering a bike, cursed as he dodged past.

  Further questioning of Howard had got her nowhere, not even the next day when he was sober. It had been a few occasions during Kat’s early to mid-teens, he had repeated miserably. Fumbling, touching, never full sex, usually – from what he could gather – when Vincent had had a few drinks. It had messed with her head, but Kat was adamant that she had got over it, even forgiven the bastard, in spite of the fact that Howard himself could not and would never forgive him. It was why he had been so reluctant even to have the man at the funeral, Howard had explained, before pleading with Eleanor to leave the matter alone. He had told her all he knew – he swore – all that Kat had ever told him. What seemed to distress him most was that he had broken his pledge of silence.

  The shock waves of abhorrence and betrayal had followed Eleanor back to London and then settled, a darkness in her head that teemed with new understanding. Kat’s souring as she hit adolescence, the hostility – even the promiscuity – she saw it all in a new light now. As to what her sister had actually been through, what Vincent might or might not have subjected her to, the dread Kat must have felt on his nightly prowls, Eleanor could not bring herself to imagine. Instead, worsening like a pain as each day passed, was the longing to speak to Kat herself: to ask her why she had not shared this most terrible of secrets with her own sister; to offer her what clumsy comfort she could; but, most of all, to say sorry, for having been too blind, too self-centred, to see what had been under her nose.

  But Kat wasn’t around for speaking to. And never would be again. Like their mother. Only the ones who deserved to be dead were still alive.

  Eleanor started to run across the common, her feet catching in sludgy drifts of old wet leaves. She stumbled, veering left away from the main path and weaving through a sloping bank of thin trees. Ahead, some fencing came into view, high and rusted. Through its metal lattice she glimpsed an embankment snarled with brambles.

  Straightforward and trusting, Nick had written. But she wasn’t even that. Kat had known it. Kat hadn’t trusted her. Kat had endured hell rather than trust her.

  Above her a train crashed past, deafening. Faces flashed at the windows. Eleanor stared up at them through the cage of brown wire fencing, her eyes streaming; the outsider looking in. The people in the carriages had families and livelihoods to go to, jobs they were on top of, pasts that made sense. Their lives hadn’t stalled. Or been built on lies.

  A few yards to her left a gap in the fencing caught her eye. It was a tempting hole with spiked, bright curling edges, recently cut. From there it would be a two-minute scramble up to the top. The trains were so frequent. So fast. Maybe her life could make sense too. Circles could be completed. It took courage, that was all. Courage that her mother had had, and Kat too, in her way.

  Nick returned to swimming with maximum effort, working through his repertoire of strokes to give his various muscle sets time to rest. Crawl. Breaststroke. Backstroke. Fifty of each. He thought about Natalie and Sasha. He wanted to be a part of their futures, whatever they held; he wanted to be involved in all of it. As for Donna… But as he tried to look ahead, his mind looped backwards, to Oxford, the cradle of the supposedly ‘gilded’ youth into which he had never truly settled, and to Eleanor and Kat. Such a striking, intense pair, with their strange priestly father and tragic childhood loss. They had instantly stood out from the crowd, both of them. The thought catapulted Nick back into the café in the covered market, Eleanor talking at him across a red gingham table cloth, a plastic flower between the salt and pepper pots, flashes of doubt and intelligence scudding across her big honest brown eyes. Fowles and Nabokov. Lepidopterists. Prisoners. Later, on a few occasions, there had been kissing.

  The threads of memory fluttered behind Nick’s salt-sore eyes, easing the aching cold and the tiredness of his body. Life wasn’t a line, he realised with sudden lucidity. It was simply a widening circle. Nothing got left behind. All of it was there, always.

  The sluggishness of his limbs was worsening, like they were forgetting how to swim. His temples thumped and his throat was sticky. Nick flipped onto his back to rest again. The sun had sunk to a point almost in line with his vision, a thick beam straight into his face. He let his eyelids fall closed, relishing the soothing cool of the water lapping round his hot pounding head. Drifting. Let the current take him. Yes, that was okay, that would do. He was good at drifting. A master.

  Nick made another monumental effort to think properly about Donna, about what he was going to do. But new rows of thicker higher waves were starting to arrive, flooding his mouth, his nose, his ears. He fought them off, windmilling his leaden arms, trying backstroke. His thoughts spun to being happy, how he missed it, how he deserved it, how hard it was to achieve. Kat had said something about that once in one of her emails, but he couldn’t remember what. And loss, she had said things about that too. Wise, moving things. She had been through so much, known so much. Nick began to shout. In frustration. Despair. For Kat. For help. But the waves kept coming, pummelling his head, punch after punch.

  Trevor peered gingerly under the sheepskin trim of his left glove, checking his watch for the umpteenth time. It was still only four-thirty – not five hours since Eleanor had stumbled out of his house, and only twenty minutes since the start of his vigil on her doorstep. Overhead, the security light kept coming on and off. He had taken the precaution of wearing his fleece liner under his cashmere coat, as well as a scarf to plug the gap between his fedora and the top of his collar, but was cold to his bones nonetheless. He had poor circulation, that was the trouble. Thanks to low blood pressure, which was supposed to be good. Larry had been the opposite – high blood pressure, so dangerous that they had eventually lived like vegans – but in the end it had been a stroke that got him, not his heart. A massive one. Bed with a headache one minute, waxy-skinned and lifeless beside him the next. It still made Trevor tremble to think of it. Death was always such a violent shock, even an expected one, like slamming into a brick wall. Trevor wished he had thought to mention this to Eleanor.

  Thirty more minutes, he decided, hugging himself and humming some of the Mahler from the radio. Hearing the click of approaching footsteps on the pavement – female footsteps, he sprang forwards hopefully. But it was a chunky girl, bare-legged in stilettoes and a mini-skirt. ‘Hiya,’ she trilled, giving a sassy wave as she tottered past.

  Trevor shuffled back into the lee of the doorway and crouched down, cursing his creaking knees and wishing he hadn’t come. Watching the taxi meter race, he had felt only foolish – rushing to the aid of a woman who almost certainly didn’t want or require it, feigning drama for his own needy purposes. He was sure that was what Larry would have said.

  The block of flats had given him something of a jolt. Clapham still had its seedy patches, he knew, but the peeling windows and pebble-dash front, set against a backdrop of bramble thickets and litter that included a broken chair, a washing machine and several items of clothes, had depressed him deeply. He had ducked into the small portico entrance like a soldier seeking cover, relieved and faintly moved to see proof of Eleanor’s residence at the top of the panel of buzzers, written in solid thick italics: KEATING FLAT 3. But there were no lights on in the building and no one answered when he rang.

  Twenty more minutes, tops, Trevor decided, leaning back into his corner. But no one came and after a while the discomfort turned to a sort of paralysis and he found himself closing his eyes.

  It was six o clock by the time Eleanor turned into her street. Her limbs dragged with fatigue and a blister had formed on her left heel, but she did her best to walk fast. Home, a bed, refuge,
was at last in sight. Soon she would be able to sleep, close her eyes, shut out the world. Somehow she had lost her bag, but her keys were in her pocket. She sought them out, gripping their sharp edges till her fingers hurt.

  Already what had happened was starting to recede, the details dissolving with the rapidity of a dream. There had been the hole in the fence, she remembered that much, big enough to crawl through, though the spikes had torn at her clothes. Her concentration had been fixed on the task in hand. Accept defeat. It was possible for life to become too much. A deep new wave of understanding and forgiveness had moved through her, melting a long-buried knot of blame and incomprehension. Her mother had given up, that was all. And she was, after all, her mother’s child.

  Once through the fence, she had fallen onto all fours for the climb up through the tangle of the embankment. The earth had felt solid under her knees, the snagging brambles no worse than pesky insects. She had swiped and swatted. Her sole aim had been to reach the metal track above.

  She was almost at the top when the ground started to come alive under her. A train was on its way. Her train. Eleanor had paused, straining to hear, desperately sure of the importance of getting the timing right. But as she did so, something other than the sound of a diesel engine burst inside her head. It was a voice. A shout, so loud that she jumped and then froze. She looked over her shoulder but there was nobody there. No, it had said. And in that instant it woke her up to the terror of what she was doing. And once the terror was there, it had been impossible to continue.

  Eleanor had slithered back down the embankment and sat hugging her knees, trembling as the train, a long goods one, roared past.