by Lucy Atkins
‘Squoll,’ he says, his brown eyes bright. ‘Squoll!’
I kiss him. ‘I know! That was a really big squirrel. And it was eating a nut, wasn’t it? Like Squirrel Nutkin.’
Susannah comes up behind him. She holds herself stiffly, and there is something hostile in the tilt of her chin, as if she has been thinking about me while I’ve been asleep, and has found me wanting.
‘Thanks for looking after him,’ I say. ‘He’s obviously having the time of his life.’
‘Yeah. Feeling better?’
‘Much. Thanks, Susannah. It’s so good of you to do this. I’m not sure what time it is – did I sleep for a long time?’
‘Almost two hours.’
‘Oh my God – two hours!’ No wonder she is angry. ‘But you should have woken me up. You wanted to work!’
She stares at me for a second, her head slightly on one side, and then she reaches out a hand as if she’s going to touch my face. Instinctively, I lean away from her hand. She drops it to her side.
Finn wriggles to be put down, then runs back to where the squirrel was. ‘Squoll!’ he calls, in an old-fashioned ‘cooee’ voice. ‘Squo-oll?’ He squats, holding the railings with both hands, and peering into the trees.
She watches him, and a gust whips a few strands of her silvery hair across her cheek. It is the look of a grandmother – tender, proud, tinged with longing. Then she turns her eyes back to me and the warmth drains from them. ‘Go back inside, Kali. We’ll come in, in a second. Put the kettle on. Go on – you’re cold – go.’
I glance at Finn. He is still squatting, hands on the deck railings, still calling ‘Squo-oll?’ He’ll have a fit if I try to drag him inside. This is exactly what he should be doing, breathing sea air, discovering wildlife. I shiver and wrap my arms around myself, but still I hesitate, moving from one frozen foot to the other.
‘Go inside, Kali,’ she snaps, and I can tell she means it. She wants me gone.
*
There isn’t an electric kettle, just a green enamel one that goes on the stove. As I put it there, I see a little Post-it, on the countertop, next to the range.
Outside,
S
I stand there for a few moments, staring at the Post-it. Now I feel silly, rushing around like that, with panic rising. What did I think she was going to do to Finn?
Her cramped writing is familiar from the postcards in my mother’s drawer back in Sussex.
Thinking of you today,
Susannah
But why? Why on earth was Susannah thinking of my mother every year on the same day in May? I haven’t asked. She isn’t an easy person to question. But of course I must ask. Before I leave, I must find out what else she knows about my mother.
*
Through the archway I can see the tall windows on the other side of the front room, and through these I can see Finn’s bright red suit out on the deck, with Susannah bending next to him.
She really is remarkably good with him. It’s really not what you’d expect. She seems like the kind of woman who would be impatient and dismissive of small children, but she is intensely focused on Finn, as if she really does have a biological claim to him.
Perhaps there is a grand-maternal body clock too. If so, then hers is ticking like a time bomb. And she is right to disapprove of me: what sort of mother has a moment of lunacy and gets on a plane to Canada? What sort of mother turns up with her toddler unannounced at a stranger’s house on a winter’s night? What sort of mother sleeps for two hours during the day, leaving her child on a cliff edge with someone she barely knows? No wonder Susannah is hostile. Then again, if she is that annoyed at being left in charge of Finn for so long, why did she send me inside? Why not just hand him back? Perhaps she feels he needs protecting, from me.
I realize that I’m doing it again – it’s the old fear of inadequacy. From the moment Doug and I decided to try for a baby I began to be afraid that erratic mothering is passed down in the blood. And I have certainly been distracted here – I think about the vase, Finn’s panicky wails and the slammed-shut door. I really haven’t been properly tuned into what he needs, not really. Maybe this is how it starts: little moments of neglect that multiply and join up and swell into full-on bad mothering.
But I’m being ridiculous. I may not be the perfect mother but I would never – ever – allow myself to treat Finn the way she treated me – loving him, then turning away; being there – then not. Right now, I am his fixed point; I am his, completely. And just for these few years, while he is small, he is mine, too. The image of a yin-yang ball pops into my head: the two of us curled around each other, forming one smooth sphere. I will not ever abandon him the way she abandoned me.
It suddenly occurs to me – genuinely for the first time – that Doug might have felt a bit left out. I’ve been trying so hard to be there for Finn, to be a better mother, that I have sealed Doug out of our little sphere. I have given all my constancy to Finn and left Doug in the cold. If anything, I loved Doug even more after we had Finn – but day to day I have failed to show him this. Instead, I have resented him for working. For sleeping. For still having a career. Whatever has happened between us, I’ve definitely played my part.
I need to talk to him. When they come back in, I’ll ask to borrow the house phone.
While the kettle heats up, I wander through to the living room and look at the shelves behind the Chihuly sculpture: big white cubes filled with books and objects. A ficus trails down from one of the highest shelves. Most are packed with books, but in one there’s just a wooden Buddha and a framed Tibetan prayer. Another cube contains three large, smooth white pebbles, an oil burner and a carved wooden box containing essential oils: bergamot, lavender, jasmine. In another cube there is a beautiful pottery plate decorated with blue fish.
I browse the cubes that contain her books. There are novels, many in hardback: Pulitzer Prize winners, household names, mostly women – Nadine Gordimer, Margaret Forster, Toni Morrison, Maya Angelou, E. Annie Proulx. There is a large section of art history: two big cubes of it. In another, there’s a whole chunk of poetry, everything from Milton to Sylvia Plath. One slim book, low down, catches my eye because I’ve seen it so recently. Its pale blue spine leaps out at me.
I pull it out. And then I just sit for a moment, and stare at it in my hands. It’s the exact same edition. I turn it over. There is postcard marking a page. Before I even open it I know what page it will be.
You Left Me
You left me, sweet, two legacies, –
A legacy of love
A Heavenly Father would content,
Had He the offer of;
You left me boundaries of pain
Capacious as the sea,
Between eternity and time,
Your consciousness and me.
Not a eulogy from a daughter, and definitely not a wedding poem.
I flick to the front of the book. ‘Susannah Gillespie.’ There is no date.
I reread the poem. I wonder if Susannah sent this book to my mother, or the other way around. I look at the back. It’s the same edition as the one in our house in Sussex, and it’s Canadian. So, yes, Susannah must have sent it to my mother. And then I realize what I’ve been missing – of course. I can’t believe I didn’t work this out right away. They were on a Californian campus in the seventies surrounded by protests, feminist consciousness-raising groups, love-ins, streaking, psychedelic drugs. They were lovers.
It’s like staring into a kaleidoscope, twisting the end and waiting for the tiny fragments to shift and clatter and roll into their final coherent pattern. And yet, this pattern doesn’t quite feel right, either. Or does it? I just don’t know.
I’m just going to have to ask Susannah outright.
I hear movement by the front door, then the dogs’ scuffling claws. A shriek rises from the kitchen and for a second I think it’s a bird, trapped inside the house, then I realize it’s the kettle’s panicky whistle. And then I hear the front door open
, the dogs burst past me to their food bowls, and Susannah is talking to Finn about squirrels. One dog laps water noisily in the kitchen.
‘Hi!’ I shove the postcard back in its place, thrust the book back on the shelf and leap up. ‘The kettle’s just boiling!’ I run over and take it off the hob, and I hear Finn’s voice, chattering nonsense back to Susannah as they open the cupboard to put away his red suit and wellies.
Southern California, spring 1976
On the surface the only thing that changed was her routine, because, of course, she didn’t go to Sea Park any more. She heard the baby orca died after five days. It couldn’t work out how to feed. They moved it to a separate tank and tried to feed it mashed-up cream and fish through a tube but it starved to death within earshot of its distraught parents.
She couldn’t discuss what had happened. Gray was away, which made it easier, and she simply told Susannah that she didn’t need any more data on the dolphins. Susannah seemed to accept this as an explanation for Elena’s sudden presence in the condo.
She told herself that she needed to think it through, rationally, before making any firm decisions or telling anybody, but really, her mind was made up as the film rolled to a close. In just under a fortnight she’d be heading north to British Columbia. The researcher – Jonas – had offered her a ride and a place on his friend’s houseboat for the summer. She could meet the others up there, and become part of the orca-mapping project. Really, there was no dilemma: she still had her small inheritance – she was going.
She spent a lot of time in her room, reading everything she could find about orcas. She read that their bodies were black and white to trick their prey – in the murky underwater world only the white part of the killer whale’s body shows up – so they appear far smaller and less threatening than they really are. After reading a paper about the structure of the dorsal fin she realized that Orpheus’s dorsal had probably collapsed, not through sickness but through lack of use. In the wild, orcas constantly use their dorsal – they dive deep and often – and so the cartilage is strengthened and bolstered. Swimming circles in a shallow tank was nothing in comparison to the workout of swimming in the wild. It seemed likely to Elena that Orpheus’s six-foot fin had simply atrophied in captivity.
She read that the orca survey researchers had already established that Pacific Northwest orcas were divided into two distinct races – residents and transients. Transients had more pointed fins, travelled in smaller groups and ate marine mammals, whereas residents ate mainly fish, and socialized in large groups. Looking at the illustrations, it looked as if Bella were a resident orca. Orpheus had been taken from the waters off eastern Iceland, but Bella was captured in Puget Sound. This meant that her family was among the whales the researchers were counting – somewhere out there, right now, in the Salish Sea.
She read all the reports she could find from the orca survey, and as she read them she understood what Jonas had been trying to tell her: this was far more than a population study. Identifying individual whales was going to allow for longitudinal studies into social relationships, travel patterns, habits – and communication. It was a way into this hidden world. The scientific potential was huge. She could become one of the first scientists – if not the first – to study orca communication in the wild.
When her head was packed with information, she’d walk down to the beach and sit in the sand, watching pelicans swoop across the sky, or pods of pacific white-sided dolphins cut along the coast. She’d walk through the sand, digging her heels in to find pismo clams, or gathering mussels from the tide pools, then take them home for Susannah to cook in garlic and butter. She had a growing list of questions for Jonas. The questions now filled half a notebook. He said he’d be back and around campus for a week before they went north. She tried not to think about Graham, still in Europe, unaware. She found that she couldn’t remember where exactly he was, or why he’d gone there. She had no idea how she was going to tell him about her decision. He might understand – she could explain it, and the rationale behind it, and he’d let her go because he had to, but it would hurt him.
The odd thing was that she couldn’t bring herself to talk to Susannah about any of this. A couple of times, when they were swimming together, she thought she’d try to explain what was happening, but then she couldn’t work out how to begin. After a while she realized what was stopping her from talking. Her instinct was telling her that Susannah wouldn’t just disapprove; she would be angry. She would take this as some kind of personal affront or rejection. Lately, the friendship had taken on a confusing shape – she felt as if she did not fully understand its rules or parameters. The last thing Elena wanted was a messy confrontation with Susannah.
Elena hadn’t spent much time in the condo before, and she was surprised to find that Susannah was hardly ever at the university. The guys rolled out of bed at nine every morning, blearily grabbed bagels or swigged juice from the carton, and, leaving trails of crumbs and coffee, disappeared to their labs. But Susannah was always around. Her teaching commitments were obviously minimal – she only ever spent a couple of hours at a time in the studio. She said this was because every creative urge had dried up since she’d been in California; the light was all wrong, she needed dampness, clouds and drizzle; the dry heat and brightness made it impossible to work. But she didn’t do much else, either.
She didn’t seem to have other friends, or anywhere else to go. She seemed to be perpetually lingering – in the kitchen, brewing another pot of coffee or chopping up a cob salad for lunch; sitting on the patio with a sketchpad or holding out a cold bottle of beer at the end of the day. Sometimes, Elena would come across her just sitting at the breakfast bar, preternaturally still, staring into space. It occurred to Elena that Susannah might be around all the time because of her. Lately, she had begun to feel waited for. Whenever she went into a room she half expected Susannah to step out of the shadows.
On the surface, everything was pretty much the same. At the end of every day, they’d walk along the road together and climb down the stone steps to the beach. They’d clamber over the rocks to their cove and swim, and then they’d lie for a bit in the sand, chatting as the sun went down. Back at the condo, Susannah would cook.
But one day, when she’d been down at the beach alone, Elena got back to the condo to find Susannah hurrying along the hallway towards the kitchen. She looked over her shoulder sharply as Elena stepped through the front door.
‘Hi.’ Elena threw her sunglasses onto the table.
But Susannah didn’t move, or speak.
‘Are you OK?’
She said nothing. Then she turned, and walked, slowly, into the kitchen.
Elena went into her room and tossed her book on the bed. Then she saw that her journal was open on the duvet. She had hidden it, as always, in a box of tapes, before she went to the beach. She went into the kitchen, determined to confront Susannah, but she wasn’t there. For once, she didn’t come back until late. The next day, nothing was said. They went to the beach in the evening, as always. Though this time they swam more, and talked less.
The problem was that Elena just wasn’t used to being around another person this much. During her whole time at the university she’d always lived on her own – even as an undergraduate she’d managed to get herself a single dorm room. Her entire childhood had been solitary. This situation would be unbearably claustrophobic if it wasn’t for the fact that in under two weeks she’d be gone.
They’d probably stay in touch. Maybe they’d even visit each other. No doubt they’d write. They’d always have these shared memories of the condo and their evenings on the beach, and they really had connected – perhaps because of the parallels in their childhoods they had recognized something in each other that normally stays beneath the surface. But over the years that too would fade. They’d forget the uncomfortable stories, or the moments when they’d looked at each other and understood, and not needed to say anything else. Elena wasn’t sure how sustainabl
e a friendship like this could ever be in the real world.
*
It was late afternoon, the day before she left, when it finally came to a head. Susannah knocked on Elena’s bedroom door. ‘Hey – I made iced tea. You want some?’
‘Well … actually … I’m kind of … ’ She dragged herself off the bed and opened the door, but Susannah was gone already, assuming she’d follow.
It was still very hot on the patio. Susannah had her eyes shut and her face tilted skywards. She was in cut-offs with her athletic brown legs stretched out, crossed at the ankles, barefoot as usual. The soles of her feet were dun-coloured and dusty. Behind her the branches of the apple tree burst with pale flaky petals.
Susannah didn’t move or open her eyes as Elena approached, but her lips curled into a smile. On the wrought-iron table the iced tea sat in two identical glasses, with stalks of mint. Elena felt the garden close in.
She didn’t sit down. She had been intending just to slip out at dawn the next day, leaving a note. But there was something about that smile.
‘Listen,’ she said. ‘You know what? I have some news: I’m quitting my PhD. I’m leaving town.’
Susannah’s eyes snapped open.
For a moment, all the garden sounds – a buzzing bee, chirping birds, the breeze rustling through the apple blossom – seemed to pause. Susannah slowly drew her legs in.
‘I’m heading up to British Columbia. I’ve … well, tomorrow, actually.’
‘You’re leaving tomorrow?’
‘Well.’ Elena pushed her hair out of her eyes, scooping it all up behind her head and tying it there with an elastic band from her wrist, too tight. ‘Yes. I guess I am.’
‘Oh. How long for?’
‘A while. I’m not sure.’
‘You’re not sure?’