Girl Unknown

by Karen Perry

  ‘Now things are good,’ I said.

  A thin smile appeared on her face. Perhaps I imagined it, but it seemed to contain a grain of pity, which confused and angered me. Behind her through the window, I could see Holly returning the clothes she had tried on to their racks.

  ‘One thing, Zoë, before Holly comes out. And please don’t take offence.’

  ‘What?’ she asked.

  ‘I hope you’re being careful. That you’re taking precautions.’

  She laughed and shook her head, making a deliberate show of her mortification.

  It had been on my mind since my conversation with Chris that morning. ‘Seriously, though. Getting engaged is one thing. Having a baby is quite another.’

  She ran her finger over her lower lip, the smile still there.

  ‘You don’t want to get caught out –’

  ‘Like you, you mean?’

  The venom in her voice was unmistakable. It came at me so suddenly it took me a moment to absorb it fully. Before I could answer, she spoke again, her voice rising with a little tremor in it. ‘Or were you referring to my mother?’

  The coolness of her sudden anger pooled in the air between us.

  ‘Why would you say such a thing?’ I asked, and thought of how it always was whenever I was alone with her – her iciness announcing itself abruptly, coming down on our conversation, like a blade slicing through air.

  ‘Any luck?’ she asked brightly, as Holly joined us on the street.

  ‘No,’ she answered.

  We tried other shops but the offerings were overpriced, largely just souvenirs, which was not what Holly wanted. She became more despondent as the afternoon wore on and eventually declared she’d had enough.

  ‘We can go to La Rochelle another day,’ I said. ‘Once the fire has burned out and we can escape the island.’

  ‘Let’s just go home, Mum,’ she said, turning for the harbour and walking back towards the bikes.

  We passed through streets of tall buildings with grand apartment blocks, clipped boxwood and lollipop bay trees standing sentry at the doors, the niggle of Zoë’s words worming its way inside me.

  Like you, you mean?

  But how did she know? Had David told her? We had never discussed it with the children – or with anybody. That he might have shared something so intimate with her – a secret so deeply private to me – felt like the worst kind of betrayal. And if she knew, had she shared her information with Chris? Or with Robbie? The worry brought a new bloom of anger. When was she going to leave us? This was our holiday and the days were petering out – how much longer would we have to tolerate her company?

  We were nearing the harbour, the air drenched with the smell of salt, smoke and petrol, when my eye was drawn to the draped folds of silk on a mannequin in a window and I stopped outside a bridal shop. An idea took hold. ‘What do you think?’ I asked Zoë. ‘Shall we go in?’

  I’m not sure what drove me to do it – anger pushing me towards meanness? Her reluctance served only to spur me on.

  ‘Come on,’ I said. ‘It’ll be fun.’

  After the glare of sunlight on the street outside, we had to wait while our eyes became accustomed to the low-key lighting and plush interiors. The shop assistant, a woman I guessed to be my own age in a smart linen suit, pearls at her throat, came forward all smiles and greetings, switching from French to English once she realized we were not natives.

  ‘Ah, but you are so young!’ she remarked gaily, when we told her that Zoë was the bride.

  She drew us further into the shop where velvet armchairs clustered in the centre of the room, a chandelier twinkling overhead.

  ‘Have you anything particular in mind, chérie?’ she asked.

  Zoë chewed her lip, looking at the rails of dresses, each one encased in a zipped clear bag. ‘Not really.’

  The first dress she tried on was a lace gown with a slim silhouette and scalloped neckline, the skirts pooling around her bare feet on to the plush grey carpet. It dragged her down, her figure appearing curveless within the crusts of lace that clung to it.

  ‘I have something better,’ Madame suggested.

  ‘I’m not sure about this,’ Zoë said quietly, but I would not listen to her reluctance.

  ‘Oh, come on!’

  The hard kernel of anger was pushing me. Let’s play my game now, I thought.

  I made her try on five dresses in all, and with each one, she became increasingly withdrawn.

  The last was a delicate thing made of white tulle, cinched at the waist with a band of nude pink satin. Beneath the whispery outer layer there was a glimpse of the same pink in silk beneath. Dainty lace appliqués adorned the bodice, which closed like a corset low on the back. Behind her a tiny train spread across the floor of the changing room.

  ‘Parfait!’ Madame declared. ‘Look at yourself!’ she demanded, turning Zoë towards the mirror. ‘You are beautiful!’

  ‘You really are,’ Holly agreed, her voice coming out hushed with awe. Or maybe it was envy.

  Zoë stood perfectly still, looking down at the reflection of her feet in the mirror, refusing to take in the full length of her body. ‘I want to take it off,’ she said quietly.

  ‘One final touch,’ Madame insisted, going to the glass cabinet and removing from it a small tiara twinkling with Swarovski crystals. ‘Just to complete the picture, yes?’

  She fixed the crown carefully into Zoë’s hair, which fell around her shoulders in a deluge of curls.

  ‘Such hair!’ Madame remarked, oblivious to the brittleness of Zoë’s mood, the shadowy look that was crossing her face. ‘There!’ She stood back to admire her handiwork. ‘What a proud man your husband will be!’

  I could see that Zoë was close to tears. Her cheerfulness over lunch, the sunshine of the day, her delight at her purchase, all of it had vanished. The weight of each dress had soaked through her, crushing any happiness inside her. On the floor, tossed to one side by the mirror, lay the orange plastic bag containing her T-shirt, its youthful sensibility forgotten amid these sombre dresses and the onerous responsibilities they symbolized. Beautiful as she was, there remained something ridiculous about her, in the same way that her ring was ridiculous – a little girl dressing up in her mother’s clothes. She had no intention of going through with the marriage – she never had. I knew it and now I had exacted my proof.

  ‘Get it off me,’ she said, distressed now, reaching behind her to claw at the clasps holding the bodice together.

  ‘Careful with that,’ Madame said, coming alive to Zoë’s fragile state, and going forward to assist. I just sat there, held back by the coldness of all she had done, her meddling, her manipulation, the memories making me cruel.

  The clasps undone, Zoë wrenched herself free of the corset, her breasts, small and wide apart, visible for just an instant. The rings of the curtain sang out as she drew them swiftly across the cubicle rail.

  Outside, the heat hung above the streets, the houses, down to the white shore, the boats clinking under the sparkling sun. Nearby on the bridge a fire raged. But in that changing room there was only cold.

  Madame bent down and picked up the corset, fingering it delicately, the look she gave it bordering on distaste as if it had been sullied by the grubbiness of this exchange. There was no sound apart from that of weeping in the cubicle, and the clink of the glass cabinet as the tiara was returned.

  The rest of the dresses were gathered up with a new alacrity, Madame saying, ‘I will put these back if you are finished,’ anxious now to be rid of us.

  Sometimes, even now it is all over, I think I can hear her crying like she did that day in the dress shop. Her weeping echoes up from the corridors of the past, making me stop whatever I am doing, momentarily thrown by what has happened. And I think of the straightness of her back as she cycled ahead of me, back along the track, past the oyster bar, empty now as the sun dipped towards the horizon. I see her in my mind’s eye cycling away from me, moving towards the evening
and all that was to come.

  22. David

  The evening began with a change of plan. Caroline, agitated from the moment she returned, complained that it was too hot to cook.

  ‘Let’s go out to eat instead,’ I suggested.

  I was lying in the semi-darkness of our bedroom, waiting for the two Solpadeine I had taken to kick in. Caroline was hastily changing out of the clothes made grimy by the bicycle ride in the heat. ‘I can’t face going back to Saint-Martin,’ she said.

  ‘Did something happen?’ I asked, made curious by her agitation. Something was clearly bothering her.

  ‘Nothing happened. I’m just hot,’ she muttered. ‘That bloody fire. God knows what kind of toxins we’re inhaling.’

  I got up slowly, heaviness sucking at the inside of my head like a wet cloth. ‘Have you got anything else I can take for a headache?’

  She rummaged in her bag before handing me a sachet of white tablets. Normally I scoffed at her homeopathic remedies, but the headache had been building all day, blurring my thoughts and making me feel clammy. It had eased after the lunchtime wine, but now that it was wearing off, the pain had roared back to life.

  ‘I’ll ring the bistro in the village. I’m sure they’ll have a table free,’ I told her, slipping two pills under my tongue, then went downstairs to make the call.

  The house was quiet, but for the sounds of shuffling preparation coming from behind closed doors, the others having retreated to their rooms to dress for dinner. Passing Zoë and Chris’s room, I heard him say: ‘What about the little black number?’

  Zoë’s reply sounded unhappy: ‘No. I don’t think so.’

  I didn’t linger, still haunted by what I had overheard of their lovemaking earlier that day. In the kitchen, Caroline’s half-hearted start at dinner sat forlorn and abandoned on the table. I took my phone and went into the quiet of Alan’s study, rang the bistro and booked a table – indoors, because of the smoke still hanging in the air – then lay on the couch and closed my eyes.

  Caroline’s remedy was stronger than I’d thought it might be, pulling me under into a troubled sleep. I was caught in the tangle of a strange dream when I heard someone say, ‘Dad? Dad!’ in an urgent tone, and felt a pulling at my sleeve. Opening my eyes I saw Holly, gazing anxiously at me from behind her glasses. In her hand was a piece of paper.

  ‘What is it?’ I asked, pulling myself into a sitting position, a groggy feeling in my head, like I was under water.

  ‘I found this.’ She held up the piece of paper, still watching me with those big worried eyes.

  I saw the blue and white insignia of the letterhead, and recognized it immediately. Panic crawled into my throat. ‘Hang on, Holly. I can explain.’

  ‘It says, “Test results are inconclusive.” ’ She pronounced the words carefully, stressing each vowel, making it sound like a verdict of guilt or a fatal diagnosis of some sort.

  My thoughts teemed with confusion. Where had she found it? I was sure I had left the letter, along with the other information on DNA testing, in my desk at the university.

  ‘Robbie and I were playing Scrabble. We needed a page to keep score. Mum said there was paper here on the desk.’

  She pointed to the old mahogany bureau, a sheaf of my documents in a blue folder alongside some journals and books. The letter from the clinic must have been slipped in among them. Holly was rattled and upset. I knew I had to act quickly, and carefully. ‘Listen, sweetheart, it’s not what you think.’

  ‘It says she’s not our sister.’

  ‘No, that’s not what it says.’

  ‘It is.’

  ‘No.’ Her panic was winding me up when I needed to stay calm. ‘All it says is that the samples they were given proved insufficient to make a match.’

  ‘But she might not be our sister,’ Holly said, stubbornly holding her position.

  ‘Look, love, Zoë is your sister. I know that for sure.’

  ‘How?’

  ‘I just do,’ I said, my voice rising a little, tetchiness creeping into it. I was in no fit state for this conversation and wished I’d destroyed the damn letter instead of keeping it. ‘To be honest,’ I told her, ‘I don’t know why I even did the test. It was foolish of me.’

  ‘You mustn’t have believed her,’ Holly stated shrewdly.

  ‘It was a shock, when I found out. But once the shock wore off, I saw plainly that she was telling the truth.’

  ‘Does Mum know about this?’ she asked. She was still holding on to the letter. I wanted to take it back from her but the way she was clutching it told me she wouldn’t relinquish it easily.

  ‘She knows about the test,’ I said.

  ‘She does? That it was inconclusive?’ Holly sounded disbelieving, and rightly so. She knew her mother well.

  ‘I know it looks strange, sweetheart,’ I said, deflecting her question. ‘I know it’s a fright to come across a document like this, but what you’ve got to understand is that it is only one result.’

  ‘But it’s inconclusive, Dad. That means she could be anyone.’

  ‘It’s very common for these tests to come back inconclusive.’

  ‘She doesn’t feel like my sister,’ she told me. ‘She feels like a stranger. Like she doesn’t belong.’

  Upstairs, I heard a door opening, a voice on the landing.

  ‘Listen, Holly, you have to promise me you won’t tell anyone else.’

  ‘Why not? Not telling anyone else makes it sound like a secret.’

  ‘You don’t have the full facts, Holly. If you’d let me explain –’

  ‘But why does it have to be a secret? That doesn’t seem right.’

  ‘Please stop calling it a secret,’ I said, as calmly as I could. She sounded a little frantic and my own mind was racing. ‘It’s not a secret. It’s just that I don’t want everybody to know about this piece of paper because it’s meaningless in the great scheme of things.’

  As if to prove my point, I took the document from her hands and scrunched it into a ball, tossing it into the grate. She followed it with her eyes, her brow creasing with thought.

  ‘Now listen, Holly. It’s really important that we don’t upset everyone else by bringing it up,’ I said, taking her shoulders and brushing the hair from her eyes. As reassuringly as I could, I said: ‘It’s not the time or place, okay, sweetheart?’

  She didn’t say anything, but continued to gaze at the ball of paper in the grate.

  ‘You and I can sit down later and have a proper chat about it, I promise.’ Outside, I could hear Caroline calling to the others.

  ‘It’s our birthday, remember?’ I said, smiling, trying to chivvy her out of her mood.

  ‘Fine,’ she said, turning towards the door, but I felt her stubbornness nonetheless and knew she hadn’t given in. My heart was hammering from the encounter.

  ‘We’re all set,’ Caroline said, startling me. I was so lost in my own catapulting thoughts, I hadn’t noticed her head poking around the door. ‘Are you ready?’

  ‘Sure,’ I said, flustered but trying to mask it with busyness as I located my wallet and phone, and put them into my pockets. It was not until we were outside and halfway down the street that I remembered the letter pressed into a ball and left lying in the grate.

  On the stroll down to the village square, our group separated, Holly and Caroline hanging back while the rest of us went on ahead. Zoë, wearing a blue dress and make-up, linked my arm as we walked. We talked about the day, the fire and the smoke, but my mind was elsewhere. I kept thinking about Holly, trailing behind with Caroline – of the new knowledge she possessed. Once or twice I glanced back at them, but the narrow streets were darker than usual, the shadow of smoke making the air gloomy. I couldn’t tell if they were talking, let alone make out their expressions.

  At the bistro, the tables outside were empty. For once, all the diners were indoors, cocooned against whatever poisons infused the air. Our table was at the back, and we made our way through the crowded room.
The noise level was high beneath the stringed bulbs that swung across the ceiling, the smell of smoke already fading in memory, replaced by the scent of garlic sautéed in butter. At the next table, a group of young men – all ripped jeans and messy hairstyles – were enjoying a raucous meal. They glanced up at us as we took our seats, Zoë and I sitting alongside each other, our backs to the wall, Robbie and Chris opposite.

  Things began to go awry when the others arrived. Holly was staring at Zoë. ‘You can’t sit there,’ she said.

  Zoë laughed, confused.

  ‘We sit together,’ Holly went on, ‘me and Dad, on our birthday.’ Her voice was cold.

  ‘Oh.’ Zoë began to get up.

  I put a hand to her arm to stop her. ‘Stay where you are, Zoë. Hols, why don’t you sit here?’ I indicated the seat next to me at the top of the table. ‘That way you’ll still be next to me.’

  A frown came over Holly’s face.

  ‘It’s not the same,’ she said quietly.

  ‘Sorry, Zoë,’ Caroline intervened firmly. ‘A family tradition, you understand.’

  ‘Of course,’ she said, getting to her feet, a little flustered.

  ‘Here, come and sit by me,’ Chris offered, patting the seat at the bottom of the table but Caroline had already put her scarf on the back of it.

  ‘Caroline’s sitting there,’ Zoë said in a flat voice, and took the seat at the top of the table.

  One of the guys beside us glanced over.

  Holly sat in against me. Despite her small triumph, she did not look pleased.

  ‘How about some champagne?’ Chris suggested, seeking to lift the mood that had settled over the table. He ordered a bottle of Veuve Clicquot and I wondered, briefly, whether he was planning to pay for it. Diamond rings, a foreign holiday, eating out – did Susannah know about this, I wondered? And would she ultimately be footing the bill for Chris’s generosity? The champagne, however, was a welcome distraction, all that faffing with corks and glasses, drawing attention away from Holly’s brittle mood, Zoë’s obvious hurt.