‘Darling, he’ll be fine,’ says Emma. ‘I’m sure some lovely family has found him by now. They’ll look after him.’
To judge from the wails, this is more painful than the thought of Blue Bunny lost in the wood.
I shower and wash my hair, using Delphine’s almond shampoo. I’m wrapped in my towel, applying aftersun, when Sophie comes in without knocking, throwing herself down on the bed. ‘He’s never going to shut up,’ she says, pressing her palms into her eye sockets. ‘Oh my God, what a noise.’
‘I know, poor creature. You were like that, with Boy. Do you remember Boy? He was a girl, but you cut off his pigtails.’
She lies back on my pillows, yawning, flicking through the books on my bedside table while I get dressed. She’s not really watching me as I brush my hair and put on a little mascara, as I pick up the canvas shopper containing Blue Bunny and put it on the top shelf at the back of my cupboard.
Overhead, the fan blades go wuh wuh wuh.
‘Have you got any nail-varnish remover?’ she asks.
‘I think so. Check the wash bag by the sink.’
She gets up and I can hear her unzipping it, rummaging around. Got it, she says. When she comes out with the bottle and cotton wool pads, she’s wearing Emma’s bracelet on her wrist. ‘This old thing again,’ she says. ‘I like the pineapple. So retro.’ She angles her wrist, inspecting the beads and trinkets. ‘What’s this one?’ she asks, fingering the blue glass.
I tell her it’s to ward off bad luck. And that’s all I say, at first. But just before we go through to join the rest of them I say, ‘Just pop that back where you found it, please,’ and she looks at me suddenly, a quick sharp glance, and asks, ‘Can’t I just wear it for supper? It’s a piece of junk, right? What’s it doing here, anyway?’
‘Someone gave it to me, a long time ago,’ I say, and she smiles dismissively, ‘Oh. I see. A boyfriend.’
It’s a risk, and I’m afraid. But Emma’s too distracted at supper to notice my daughter’s tacky little bracelet. Christopher won’t settle, and keeps appearing at the table like a wraith, a small and tragic apparition. She and Ben are up and down all evening like jack-in-the-boxes.
All the time, while Sophie reaches for bread and pours herself more water, the trinkets and beads slide and spin and clink on the string looped around her wrist. It’s a tiny sound, a tiny spectacle that catches nobody’s interest. It’s a signal from the past; but no one can decipher it but me. I’m relieved about this, of course. Yet I’m also conscious of a sense of insult. It meant so very little to her. Nothing, perhaps. ‘Keep it,’ she’d said. ‘You can give it back when we meet up next time.’ And then, seeing my expression, ‘It’s not valuable, it’s just bits and bobs, silly old stuff. You don’t have to wear it if you don’t like it.’
I clear the table and boil the kettle for tisanes. ‘I could make some calls tomorrow, before you go,’ I say, as the kettle starts to keen. ‘I could ring the monastery, see if it has turned up.’
‘Would you?’ Emma says. ‘Not much hope, but . . .’
‘You never know,’ I say.
When I go in to say goodnight to Sophie, she’s already asleep: her lamp still on, white wires trailing from her ears. I ease out the earphones and put the iPod on the bedside table. The bracelet is still on her wrist, the blue glass of the evil eye darkening as I lean across and click off her light. She murmurs something and rolls over, the linen sighing.
I do not dream. The sound of the sprinklers wakes me briefly in the early hours: the soft pattering, like the beating of hundreds of wings.
In the morning I find Cecily goggling at cartoons while Emma sleeps on the sofa in an unflattering oversized T-shirt printed with poodles. I stand by the coffee table for a little while, watching her: the palm under her hot cheek, the wedding ring and the white mark left by the strap of her wristwatch, the fine gold bristles on her shins.
While the others eat breakfast I walk around the lawn holding my phone to my ear, doing a bit of gesticulating, in case anyone is watching; and when I come back into the house I report that there’s no sign of the rabbit at the monastery, but I’ve left my number in case it turns up. And I offer to go back to the little town where we bought the crêpes, ‘just in case someone’s found it and left it on a bench or something’, giving Ben and Emma time to pack up.
‘Oh no, you mustn’t,’ they say. ‘Are you sure . . .? God, that would be so incredibly kind.’
I don’t bother, of course. I drive a little way along the coast road and stop to buy melon and aftersun. As I come out of the pharmacy I drop the plastic bag containing Blue Bunny in a bin. Then I go to the main square and order a café au lait and watch the yappy little dogs being exercised. It’s fairly early, and there’s very little traffic, just the occasional scooter whining through the back streets. Women in housecoats are mopping front steps, or throwing open the upper windows and draping bed linen over the sills. I get out my sketchbook and do a quick drawing of two old men smoking and reading newspapers on a bench.
Soon the Nashes will be putting their cases into the car, and then they’ll drive away, and Thérèse’s husband will drop her off at the end of the drive. She’ll change the sheets and sweep the floors and scour the basins, and quiet order will be restored to all the rooms, as we wait for Charles to arrive.
Emma
‘I don’t get it,’ Ben whispers as we lie beneath pearl-coloured sheets, lamps angled low, mindful of Cecily’s cot in the corner. ‘It’s weird, isn’t it?’
‘You think it’s odd that she took a shine to me? What’s so strange about that?’ I shiver with laughter, but I’m a little hurt, too. Why shouldn’t Nina like me? Why shouldn’t she recognise in me the things I’d feared might be lost forever? I can’t explain to Ben how this feels: to be seen, again, for who I really am. Not to be a person always in the context of other people. However much I love them.
I think of Nina moving between the soft spots of light in her father’s bedroom, the room with the writing desk and the view. Unpacking her bag, the white and navy and dove-grey clothes, her sandals and the small bottle of topaz-coloured scent that smells of figs and spice. Placing her hairbrush and the stack of paperbacks on the bedside table. Is it really so very strange that I have a friend like Nina?
‘No, I don’t mean that, exactly,’ he says. ‘It’s just – what do you really know about her, anyway?’
‘I know enough!’ I say. ‘Not all friendships hinge on a shared interest in Arsenal and pranks you played on the geography teacher twenty-five years ago.’
‘She’s a bit . . . cagey,’ he’s saying, and I say that’s rubbish, she seems pretty open, what about all that stuff at supper about her dad: ‘I guess that explains this house, anyway.’
‘And the one in Pakenham Gardens,’ he says, thoughtfully. ‘Somehow, I doubt Charles’s practice does that well. Guilt money. Her father sounds like a nightmare.’
‘I think she’s a bit lonely,’ I whisper, and as I say it I realise it’s true: Sophie hardly needs her now, and there’s Charles, of course; but for all his easy charm there’s something a little detached about him, a little distant. It’s a novelty, feeling sorry for Nina, but suddenly I’m overcome with pity.
‘Oh, don’t get me wrong,’ he says. ‘I like her. She’s great. Very generous. God knows how much it would have cost us, to rent a place like this for ten days.’ He knows he has been tedious about money recently, a bit of a killjoy, but he has been mulling things over: ‘That stain on Christopher’s ceiling. That needs looking at. We should probably think about re-roofing. It’ll be tight, but we’ll manage. We’ll have to.’
I put down my book and turn off my light and a few moments later I hear the rattle as he takes off his spectacles. He reaches out for me in the dark, presses his mouth against my ear and murmurs, ‘I’m sure the next contract will work out fine. We’ll sort out the roof when we get back.’ Go crazy, I think. Knock yourself out.
Our last full day. I’m wok
en by the sound of Nina talking quietly in the garden, and then the clear pleasant sound of her singing:
James James
Morrison Morrison
Weatherby George Dupree
As I open the wardrobe and pull the pink linen dress off the hanger, I’m thinking about how little time is left. The holiday is coming to an end, of course, and so is my time with her. The thought of London occurs: the downward slide into another autumn, the afternoon light fading earlier and earlier. The cold and the rain. People taking refuge in their own homes, hunkering down, just getting through.
I’ll have to be assertive if I’m going to ask those questions: the questions about her first marriage, her childhood and her parents. The conversations we must have, if we’re going to be real friends.
I think she wants to tell me the answers. I’m almost sure she does.
But there are so many obstacles. Ben. Cool, listless Sophie who drifts around yawning, avoiding us and yet constantly nearby. The children, of course, forever teetering on the edge of catastrophe. I once heard someone on the radio saying that a bee is never more than forty minutes away from starving to death, and this fact has stayed with me because it seems to have a certain personal resonance. My children are in a perpetual proximity to catastrophe: concussion, dehydration, drowning or sunstroke. Keeping them safe requires constant vigilance.
I’ve turned into one of those mothers, full of terror.
Every so often, I steal away from them, thinking: It’ll be fine, nothing will happen, and I lie down alone on the bed or in the hammock, or I walk a little way into the pine wood; and something always goes wrong, something always happens. Someone always cries for me, and I hear the shrill just accusation beneath the pain or the fear; and I feel it, too, like a burn or a blade, an electric shock.
And then I catch them up and hold them close and kiss it better, pressing my face into their soft skin and flyaway hair, feeling the warmth of their cheeks and sticky fingers, the hope and greed and vitality of them. Working my magic; astonished, as the sobs die away, by how powerful my magic is. No one else can do this for them. I watch Nina with Sophie, whose demands are so straightforward – there’s a problem with the wi-fi, could she borrow some factor 20 – and feel both envy and a tremendous, sweeping pity.
When Nina suggests an excursion, we go along with it, flattered – I suppose – that she wants to take us somewhere that she considers special. As we assemble in the kitchen before departure, the candy-striped bag filling with sun hats and rice cakes and baby wipes, Ben says, ‘Not Blue Bunny. Blue Bunny would much rather stay here and have a rest.’
‘Daddy’s right,’ I say, ‘We’ll leave him here to look after the house,’ but then I see the expression on Christopher’s face, and I can’t bear it, I can’t summon the energy required – not in this heat, not in front of Nina – so I say, ‘Well, if you promise to hold on to him . . .’ and Ben sighs and walks off.
It is a little cooler in the hills. We park the car under the trees and walk up through the wood, the buggy wheels bumping over the cobbles, and every so often a view opens up: a ruined hamlet on the other side of the valley; the ghost of a stream snaking through the trees. Nina walks on ahead, by herself, but waits for us in the shade of the gatehouse. She points out the little statue of the Madonna and child set in the wall and I look up at it, grateful for the hot dusty wind, taking a swig from a bottle of water and then pouring a little over my wrists. ‘He’s a proper baby,’ I say, admiring his balloon cheeks. So many holy infants look like bank managers or middle-grade civil servants, tiny old men in loin cloths, piously administering peace with a raised finger.
I’m conscious of the noise we make as we walk through the cloisters and courtyards, the library and refectory, Cecily starting to struggle in the buggy, Christopher testing out the various echoes. He’s either racing on or lagging behind, bending down to examine a trail of ants bearing away the corpse of a woodlouse. Hurry up. Slow down.
In the dining hall we wait as he tiptoes along a narrow path of white tiles, his face blank with concentration, teeth pressed into his soft lower lip. He’s almost there, and then he hesitates and wobbles and has to start all over again. I’m aware of Ben’s irritation as he pushes the buggy on towards the doorway, and Nina catches my eye and smiles at me, full of solicitude: for me and for Christopher. I experience her kindness as if she has held out a hand to me, to us both. ‘Oh very good, darling!’ I say, when he’s finally done. ‘What a clever boy!’ and she joins in, applauding him, her eyes shining.
The moment of Nina’s kindness stays with me, as clear and reviving as a drink of cold water, while we stand on the terrace counting the twelve tolls of the bell in the tower, and help Christopher to light a candle in the chapel. It stays with me as we go to look at the beehives, as we return to the car, as we stop at the market in a nearby town to buy crêpes from a girl in a van. While I’m lifting Christopher so that he can see the thin batter being ladled onto the hot plate (the pleasing deftness of her movements as she levels it off and fills the crêpe and flips it into a wrapper), I’m thinking of that moment. Feeling better for it.
We wander from stall to stall in the dappled shade, between mahogany behemoths and trestles piled with vegetables and old lace and junk, and I have Christopher’s hand in my own, just resting there, soft and pliant, but as we pass the second-hand toy stall it leaps and tugs, his attention hooked like a fish. Instead of hurrying him on as I would in England, I let him stop and choose. It’s so easy to allow him to be happy, I think. I should allow him to be happy more often.
Our last afternoon. As we return to the car and drive back to the house, I find myself thinking: this time tomorrow we’ll be checking in, we’ll be waiting in the departure lounge, we’ll be stowing our things in the overhead lockers.
Nina and Sophie vanish off to the pool, and because of this Ben and I are just a little more relaxed, perhaps. Little metal cars gouge passes through the gravel as Christopher creates his world in the garden, keeping up a low contented muttering full of instructions and warnings. Sensing this makes us more available, Cecily is suddenly ambitious: she’s trying to pull herself up, wishes to experiment with walking. When Ben takes her round the lawn, she reels along, hanging off his hands, her steps as high as a dressage pony’s or a chorus girl’s, drunk with delight and self-satisfaction.
I leave them and go out to the black pool to do my twenty lengths.
Side by side under the parasols, Nina and Sophie are dozing. The pages of a book flutter in the breeze. The place is lost.
I pick my way around the flip-flops, the bottles of mineral water and Piz Buin, and as I drop my towel on a lounger my attention catches on the sheen at Nina’s temples and the little runnels left in her hair as she rakes her oily fingers through it. For some reason, I’m reminded of something – not even a memory, more of a half or quarter of a memory. The neat sharp bite marks made by the teeth of a comb as a girl pulled it through her dark and dirty hair.
It’s a precise impression, but it’s isolated, untethered. The girl has no features, no expression. No name, no context. Someone I was at school with, probably. I can’t remember.
It must have disturbed me at the time, for some reason. Why else would it stick?
Though no one’s watching, I hurry towards the steps and into the shallow end, humiliated by my baggy olive costume, my belly, my rough pale skin. I feel better once I’m in the water. Carving through it, I count out the daily lengths.
In the deep end I fill my lungs and put my face under and let go, gently rotating and tilting in the water as the motion leaves it. I was once so at home in my body that I wasted it, rarely noticing it, never bothering to celebrate its strength and efficiency. I’ll never be beautiful again, I think. The water licks at my ears. I hear it slopping through the filter and over the infinity edge; repeatedly knocking Christopher’s orange armband against the ladder in an uneven tattoo. I hang there as my shadow drifts over the bottom of the pool, becoming
increasingly distinct and definite. My pulse starts to clamour.
I wait as long as I can, until I can’t wait any longer. Then I surface, gasping, and swim to the edge, resting my arms on the side as the water pulses over it and spills into the channel beneath. The bell sounds in the valley. The children will be getting hungry.
I’m clearing away their tea things when Nina comes back from the pool, and she’s just in time to hear Christopher demanding another biscuit. If she wasn’t there, I’d probably give in, but today I feel I can do better. There’s a bit of a row, which Nina elegantly defuses. ‘If you come into the garden with me,’ she tells him, ‘I know a game we can play.’
I never play games with him, I think. Another thing to feel bad about.
I scoop up Cecily and sit her on my hip and try to interest her in a kiss but she squirms and pushes my face away with her fat little hands, wanting to be released. Dribble has soaked her top, and her cheeks are pink pantomime circles. In our bedroom, she crawls around shouting crossly while I dig for the Calpol in the spongebag patterned with sailing boats, and then I run her a shallow bath. I’m peeling off her sundress while singing ‘Old Macdonald’ (her favourite, she particularly likes making the piggy noises), when I hear the scream.
It’s very high and thin and whippy, a streamer in the wind. I’ve never heard him make a noise like that before.
I run with her through the house, to the terrace, almost losing my footing on the steps. ‘Christopher!’ I say as he hurtles towards me, eyes wide. He throws his arms around my thigh and I put my hand out to the table, steadying myself. ‘What on earth was all that about? I’m so sorry,’ I call to her as she comes over the grass to join us, laughing and reaching out to ruffle his hair.
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