Good Girls

by Amanda Brookfield

  ‘All that stuff with Luke about your laptop and phone. Taking his mind off his ankle.’

  ‘Oh that.’ She laughed again, starting properly to relax. ‘That wasn’t me taking your son’s mind off his poorly ankle. That was me being a ruthless aunt. I have a new smartphone I don’t understand. I want to open a Twitter account and don’t know how, and I am thinking of starting a blog. Luke got me further in twenty minutes than I would ever have managed on my own in days. He was fantastic – a mine of information…’ She broke off because Howard was giving her one of his new odd looks, as if he was watching her mouth move rather than actually listening to what came out of it.

  ‘What sort of blog?’ he asked after a pause.

  ‘Oh I don’t know.’ Eleanor was aware of striving for a levity she did not feel, both because Howard’s intensity was making her nervous and because her blog idea was cherished but still very hazy. ‘The challenges of teaching idle teenagers. Why reading matters. Stuff like that. Dull probably.’ She took a swig of wine by way of escape, only to find herself gasping out loud. ‘Oh wow… that is… my goodness… truly delicious.’

  Howard’s face lit up. ‘So you do like it. Good.’

  A waiter arrived with their starters, setting down the plates and then proceeding to describe what was on them in such detail that Eleanor had to stifle a childish urge to giggle. With Howard so earnest and the place so grand, she had a sudden uncharitable wish that she was eating out with someone more relaxed and normal – someone like Trevor or Megan, who would have been only too ready to see the funny side.

  It was some fifteen minutes later when she had forgotten all about being on her guard, that Howard, chopping at the slithers of pink duck breast he had ordered as a main course, announced solemnly, ‘There is something I need to tell you, Eleanor, something I am hoping you might have guessed.’

  Under the flap of the tablecloth, Eleanor was all at once vividly conscious of the proximity of her brother-in-law’s legs, his knees and shins, inches from hers. She dropped her gaze to her plate, where three scallops, fat as scones, sat on a colourful cocktail of salad and vegetables, surrounded by spirals of a buttery yellow sauce. In spite of everything, her mouth flooded with saliva.

  ‘Hey, are you sure you wouldn’t prefer a glass of white with those?’ Howard urged, breaking the moment.

  Eleanor assured him she didn’t, seeking refuge in a hefty swig of the delicious red to demonstrate the point. He was understandably playing for time, she decided, his courage faltering. She must be kind, that was paramount. She sliced off a wedge of scallop and started eating. The taste was sensational; firm on the teeth, but soft as marshmallow, the flavour salty-sweet. She stole a glance at Howard, chewing his duck and looking tormented. All she wanted was a decent friendship, an avenue to her sister’s children. Yet sometimes men were drawn to women who didn’t overtly need them, as she knew only too well from the wild years after Igor. She swallowed and cleared her throat. ‘You were saying?’

  Howard threw down his knife and fork. ‘You must have noticed something,’ he urged softly. ‘It’s hard to hide. Insane of course. Hopeless.’ He shook his head wretchedly. ‘And the very last thing I had planned. Or expected.’ He pressed his fists to his temples, moaning. ‘Eleanor, tell me you must have noticed a certain… closeness—’

  ‘Well I have…’ Eleanor swallowed.

  ‘We have to be so careful because of the children,’ Howard burst out, all the composure in his face dissolving. ‘And I want your blessing on it, Eleanor. I need your blessing.’

  ‘My blessing?’

  ‘On me and Hannah.’ He held up both hands to stop her speaking. ‘I know, I know – it’s far too early. And she’s young – far too young. But we… there is such…’ His face twitched with emotion. ‘It’s like it was meant to be,’ he said at length. ‘She came through when I needed her. The children adore her, and not surprisingly, because she is brilliant with them…’

  ‘And the dog,’ offered Eleanor feebly, groping through her astonishment for something to say.

  ‘Oh yes, Barty too – she’s a marvel with him.’ Howard laughed the loose easy laugh of one who has divested himself of a great burden. ‘She has all of us, the whole gang, eating out of her hand. But…’ He shook his head, his expression clouding, ‘I am not a complete idiot. I know it is too much too soon. Hannah knows it too. She might be young, but she is no fool.’

  Eleanor was tempted to seek clarity on the exact age of the nanny but feared this might appear unfeeling. Amid her own private flood of relief, she also found herself fighting a surge of outrage on Kat’s behalf. Six months dead, and her husband had fallen for the au pair.

  ‘It doesn’t in any way diminish what I felt for Kat,’ said Howard quietly, perhaps having seen more in her expression than intended. ‘Like I say, it was not planned. I fought it – we both did. It has just… emerged.’

  A look of such sheepish happiness had overtaken him, softening the pointy features of his face, that Eleanor couldn’t help smiling. Life did just happen.

  ‘And because of that – because of Kat – I want your approval,’ continued Howard doggedly. ‘I need your approval, Eleanor.’

  Out of the corner of her eye, Eleanor could see their waiter pondering whether to make an approach to clear for the next course. ‘Well, I’m not going to give it to you.’

  ‘Because you think it’s wrong.’ It was a statement not a question, delivered in the grim tone of one hearing what had been expected.

  ‘Oh no, not because of that.’ Eleanor hesitated. A small wicked part of her was starting to enjoy herself. The whole situation was indeed insane, as Howard himself had pointed out, but Kat, with her wildness, might even have liked that, she decided suddenly. Most importantly, Hannah would do her best to look after Howard and the children. And love wasn’t about choice, she reminded herself. In that sense it could never be ‘wrong’. ‘What I think,’ Eleanor went on carefully, ‘is that when two people connect, really connect, in whatever circumstances, it is rare and to be treasured.’

  Howard let out a sharp laugh of relief. ‘So, you are okay with it?’

  ‘Only you have to be okay with it, Howard. You and Hannah. If you two are happy, then that is all that matters. I’m not going to judge you.’ Eleanor sat back smiling. ‘I hope that is what you needed to hear.’

  In reply he leant across the table and kissed her cheek.

  On the way home in the taxi, Howard suddenly asked if Kat had been faithful to him. ‘That you know of.’

  ‘Absolutely. That I know of. Not that she would have told me. We didn’t exactly share confidences, remember?’ she reminded him dryly. ‘Why do you ask anyway?’

  Howard absently traced a finger over the red light of the door-lock. ‘I found this letter – an email, printed out – from a man called Nick Wharton. It was at the back of her desk drawer, folded up. He was turning forty and wanted to know how she was.’ He paused, frowning. ‘I remember the name, vaguely, back in the day. One of the many conquests before me.’ He chuckled quietly, with what sounded like pride.

  Eleanor gripped her knees as her heart rate quickened, glad of the darkness of the cab; one name and still her heart started a stampede. After all that had happened. It was pitiful. She was no better than one of Pavlov’s dogs, she decided gloomily, reacting to a bloody bell.

  Howard was still talking. ‘I checked back in her inbox, but there was no thread that I could find. It just made the fact of printing it out seem a bit odd. It got me wondering whether maybe she had embarked on some sort of correspondence I didn’t know about. Everyone’s at it now, after all,’ he went on cheerily. ‘Facebook and Friends Reunited – hooking up with old pals. I’ve had several old acquaintances get in touch with me in recent years, mostly the ones I didn’t want to hear from.’ He laughed dryly.

  Eleanor’s heart had settled back into a normal pace. ‘Oh, but I can tell you all about Nick Wharton,’ she assured Howard breezily, ‘there’s no myste
ry there.’ She went on to impart the gist of the Nick history between her and Kat, liking the way it sounded, so distant and over. ‘That email arrived when I was visiting Kat that very first time after her op – back in January last year when we… when I… still thought that she was going to get better.’ Eleanor faltered as one of the aches of loss ebbed inside her, knowing that, as always, Howard felt it too. ‘Kat got me to print it out,’ she went on more quietly, ‘and then ordered me to help compose a jolly reply. You know how bossy she could be.’ She sighed, the sadness still strong. ‘It was just a laugh. All very above board.’ Howard smiled at her looking somewhat relieved.

  The taxi had pulled up outside her flat. Eleanor scrambled out first to beat Howard to the task of paying, only to be told it was on a company account. Upstairs, it was immediately clear that Hannah had known all along the mission behind the dinner date. She avoided Eleanor’s eye, fidgeting with her thick curtain of hair, which hung loose for once, and scooping up her belongings as they exchanged pleasantries, hasty and whispered on account of the sleeping children.

  ‘The taxi is waiting to take you on,’ Howard told Hannah, smiling at the nanny in a way that blazed his true feelings so clearly that Eleanor wondered at her own dimness in not having noticed. ‘I’ll come with you. I’ll be an hour max,’ he promised Eleanor, scooping up the puppy, who blinked sleepily, staying limp with trust in his arms.

  Eleanor followed them to the top of the stairs, handing over a set of keys and shooting Howard a look designed to communicate that he could take as long as he liked.

  ‘I’m pleased for both of you, truly,’ she whispered, giving Hannah a hug.

  The girl muttered a thank you and darted after Howard down the stairwell, only to reappear a moment later, pulling a thick cream-coloured envelope out of her shoulder bag. ‘God, I nearly forgot. This came. Your neighbour said it had got into the wrong box downstairs. She was about to put it under the door as the Chinese arrived,’ she explained, before racing off again.

  Eleanor let the envelope rest in her palm for a moment, feeling its heaviness. Stepping carefully between the sleeping children, she shut herself in her bedroom and sat on the bed. The address was typewritten, the flap sealed so securely it took some ripping to get it open. Inside was another envelope, much smaller and slimmer, with her name on it, and a letter from a firm of London solicitors, grand enough to have a coat of arms under their name. She was the beneficiary of a will, the letter said. The jargon was blinding. Eleanor read it and re-read it, not believing what it seemed to be saying. It appeared she had been left a house. A house on the outskirts of Oxford. A house she had once known intimately because it was where she had worked and made love once or twice a week for almost a decade. A decade of waste and hanging on, as she had always seen it, ended by her lover’s return to his wife.

  The smaller envelope also contained a line in Igor’s spidery hand.

  My dear girl, for the best years of my life.

  Part IV

  2014 - Oxford

  29

  It was blissfully cool in the Covered Market. Eleanor stood in line at the flower stall, picking out the colours that would mix well, wanting to be ready when her turn came. She had decided to get enough for two vases, one as a centrepiece for the food and one for the sitting room, something flamboyant and dramatic, so as to give Trevor’s guests a lovely shock when they walked in.

  At the thought of the evening party, just hours away, her stomach clenched with nerves. Trevor had a signing in an Oxford bookshop and she had offered to play host for a gathering afterwards. It was hardly a big deal. But she did so want it to go well. Megan had promised to come but cried off because of a sick child.

  The flower queue was moving slowly. The girl in dungarees attending to customers looked flustered and out of her depth. Over her shoulder, Eleanor could just glimpse the sunlight bouncing off the cobbled stone wall against which she had parked her bicycle, locking it with the new heavy chain that weighed almost as much as the bike itself. Her first bike had been stolen after a few days, from the alleyway that housed the entrance to the small prestigious tutorial college that now employed her. She had emerged from her first teaching session, still reeling at the eagerness of the students, to find her little black padlocked tube in two neat pieces on the pavement, a broken circle.

  The girl in dungarees was looking close to tears. She had got some change wrong and her Sellotape machine had jammed, making it impossible to stick the packs of flower food to each bunch. Eleanor was tempted to elbow her way through the crowd to help out, or to cut loose for the deli and come back. The Covered Market was as packed as she had ever known it, thanks to the glorious wave of Indian summer heat and the usual swarms of tourists, combining with long-suffering locals trying to go about their daily lives. It seemed increasingly to Eleanor to be a peculiar miracle of Oxford that the city was able to hang onto itself amid such heaving occupation. The richness of its past hung off every stone, hovered in every particle of air but in a way that buoyed it up instead of dragging it down.

  It was in the Covered Market that Eleanor still found her own past echoing back at her most strongly. Snatches were arriving now, as they always did, of Nick cramming forkfuls of beans and toast into his mouth at the café that had once occupied the site between the butchers and the flower stall, talking eagerly about books or dissections, his wide agile lips working to keep up with his brain; and Igor, taking her one quiet birthday many years later to the leather shop that was still on the corner, to buy a handbag.

  Some memories never lost their power. It was something she had tried to explain to her Virginia Woolf group that week as they struggled with the author’s dense, multi-layered prose, pointing out that it was precisely the shimmering strata of personal history that lay at the heart of being alive. Experiences built up like sediment over the years, no less formative and essential for being invisible and often ignored. The present only derived its shape from what had gone before and what might yet come to pass; every living moment resonated with the oceans of moments that had preceded it and those that were still to arrive. There was memory and there was hope. Life, as something lived, took place between the two. The students had nodded and tapped and scribbled as they tended to when she took flight. But had they understood? What could anyone really understand at eighteen?

  A man in a peaked cap came to help the girl and the flower queue began to shift. Eleanor bought carnations, lilies and roses, together with several things she didn’t know the name of and a bunch of feathery ferns for filling out. The deli was in a post-lunch lull and had everything she wanted. Soon she was pedalling back down the Woodstock Road, the wind thickening the long bramble of her hair, her loose white shirt billowing over her jeans. She cycled hard, getting overheated in the process but needing to hurry because there was still so much to do.

  A text arrived from Trevor while she was waiting at a traffic light. He had checked into The Randolph and would be around soon with the wine. He hoped her fridge had space for the white. He had a speech of thanks prepared but wasn’t sure if it was funny enough. She was a star.

  Eleanor smiled to herself, grateful as always for Trevor’s expressions of appreciation. With For My Sins launched earlier in the month and selling very well, she had on occasion found herself musing somewhat darkly on the aptness of the term ‘ghostwriter’. She had done her job and received her fee. No one was interested in her. The same had been true of the book she wrote with Igor. Now at least she was directing her spare energies to her own writing project for once. The story was starting to take shape: Two little girls shut out by the strangely intense relationship between their parents. Two little girls who never spoke of the things that mattered because they didn’t have the words; who were close beyond measure until events they couldn’t share pushed them apart. It had even acquired a working title: The Habit of Silence.

  The traffic light changed to green. Ten minutes of vigorous cycling later the first glimpse of the pitched roo
f of what had once been Igor’s home still caused Eleanor’s heart to skip a beat. One of several properties strung out along the winding approach to Wolvercote, the house was not eye-catching in any conventional sense: a rambling, hybrid of a place, it comprised a stone cottage, added to in an amalgam of questionable styles, with a tumbledown garage at the front and a half-acre of garden at the back. Inside, the general air of dilapidation left by years of letting had initially been a shock, almost erasing at one stroke all Eleanor’s memories of the clean, austere warmth under Igor’s occupation of the property. The rooms were as numerous and spacious as she remembered them, but in one section an ugly prefab corridor had been constructed to house an extra kitchen and two pokey bathrooms. Few pipes were clear of crusty limescale clinging to their joints, swathes of hairy black mildew forested several walls, doors didn’t close, the paint peeled and the carpets were worn to the floorboards; yet Eleanor, taking it all in on her first April visit, her very own set of front door keys dangling in her hand, had still been dazzled.

  Five months on, that Igor, of all people, should have presented her with a gift of such magnitude, without warning or strings, was still something of a dream. Pleasingly, it had also lifted the veil on some of the mortification of the tail-end of their affair, allowing her to recall that the Russian had indeed once loved her passionately, as she had him. Eleanor had longed to be able to tell Igor how thankful she was, but by the time the lawyers had made contact, Igor was dead and buried, back in his homeland, beside the wife to whom he had ultimately been true. Eleanor had had to settle instead for paying her own quiet homage, by placing the book containing the newspaper obituary in the middle of the sitting room’s main wall of shelves, cocooned among some of her own favourites and where Igor himself had once kept rows of his own treasured scholarly tomes.