by Sophie Ward
Had Nicholas been commenting on her figure? She twisted round to see if she could catch sight of her backside. She had grown a little larger, certainly, over the last year; she could feel it in the pull of her clothes, in the new weight of flesh that folded and rolled when she turned in bed. Hormonal changes. She had been warned to expect this difference in her metabolism. There were loud exchanges over tea with other ex-pat ladies at the only hotel on the beach for forty miles. ‘The good doctor in Fortaleza will help you when the time comes. All herbal remedies, bien sûr.’ ‘Cocaine is herbal, Beatrice,’ Elizabeth replied. Beatrice had smiled and sniffed extravagantly. ‘Well, and isn’t that marvellous, too?’
Elizabeth insisted on her refusal to take aspirin when she had a headache, but had made a note of the good doctor’s name, and now that she had missed her period for over six months she was glad she had got through the whole business relatively unscathed. She could not remember her mother complaining about the menopause, and her mother kept her figure. She had died with elegant ankles.
From the sitting room came the impassioned voices of Brazilian actors, hurling themselves in and out of love and cardboard scenery with equal fervour. Of the many reasons the Pryces had moved to Canoa Quebrada the one that remained undiminished, for Elizabeth at least, was an affinity for the language. Her mother had brought her up to believe in their fantastical ancestors, whose fortune had been built on Port. Whenever a certain advertisement appeared on their television, her mother would exclaim, ‘That’s your great-great-uncle. You are descended from a long line of pirates.’ Elizabeth was never certain of the connection between fortified wines and theft upon the high seas, and since there had been little to show of the man in any material way other than his intermittent representation as a cloaked silhouette on late night television, she had kept the sense of the uncle as an imaginary figure from her childhood. But the influence of her Mediterranean lineage was evident as she grew older; in the easy tan and quick temper, the bump of her nose and the curl of her unruly hair that had become even wilder in her daughter, for a time.
At the thought of Rachel, Elizabeth frowned.
‘I’m hungry,’ Nicholas said, emerging from the bathroom. ‘When are we leaving?’ He paused at the particular expression on his wife’s face, which he had come to recognise over the years as pertaining to their daughter and which was in danger of being engraved upon her brow in a relief map of suffering. ‘It’s teatime in England. I’m sure you can call her if you would like.’
‘Don’t be ridiculous, Nicholas. I’ve only just got dressed.’
Her husband shrugged and glanced at the end of the bed one more time before he left the room again. Thirty-five years of marriage had encouraged him to believe that socks, like sex and good humour, were liable to become available without any prior notice. You just had to hold your nerve.
The passions of Brazilian soap stars were muted by the door closing behind him. Elizabeth decanted the contents of her day handbag into her evening clutch-purse and tried to concentrate on the night ahead. She did not want to think about Rachel. If the inner life of her husband was only available to her as a series of noises, a Morse code of the soul, her daughter’s mind was unknowable even in semaphore. A telephone conversation, especially long-distance, required preparation if Elizabeth was not to cry.
She buried her mobile phone in the bag and concentrated on arranging her hair in the mirror. Blonde highlights covered the grey streaks but the effect was one of maintenance rather than youth. The curl, so liberated by the humidity when they first arrived in Brazil, had been tamed by bleach and no longer bounced when she walked but sat limply on the shoulders of the jersey shifts Elizabeth favoured by day. Her reflection now, lit only by the table lamp, looked back at her as though from under water. Elizabeth peered closer. You are still in there, she said without conviction. The face of her daughter stared up from the depths. Elizabeth pressed her forehead against the cool glass and closed her eyes.
Such a quiet baby. You could hardly tell she was breathing most of the time. Tiptoe over to her basket and pull at the hem of her little dress. Black hair in a sweaty floss around the dainty face. Pick her up and hold her close. Feel how much she loves you. How much she needs you. Everything ahead of her. All the adventure to come.
Her daughter had been an accommodating child, and caused no trouble at all during her teenage years beyond the usual dalliances with body art and drugs so mild that Elizabeth had wondered at the point of it. Elizabeth had come of age in the era of Ronnie Laing. ‘I mean, surely if you want to get high and scar yourself you can find something more interesting than cannabis and a butterfly tattoo?’ That was the sort of mother she had been; relaxed and fun. She could easily handle a little childish rebellion. It was only after Rachel had left home and the evidence of an independent personality began to emerge that Elizabeth realised she did not understand her daughter at all.
She was secretive, that was the problem. Elizabeth had never appreciated the need for secrets and she considered people who insisted on privacy to be morally dubious. Elizabeth herself held no secrets. Or at least the ones she remembered were purely in the interests of those she loved. The best human instinct was to communicate and share. Weren’t the greatest works of art, of poetry, of science, born from a desire to be known? Elizabeth wanted to know as much as she possibly could about everyone she met and in turn she tried to give something of herself. ‘Only connect’, Forster had said, and yet her daughter, the person to whom she had actually given birth, was determined to disconnect. At least that was how it seemed.
Within a year of Rachel moving to a house-share in an unattractive area of north London, Elizabeth was told her daughter was a lesbian. Not by Rachel, who could have told her at any time and would have received nothing but support, but by Helen, a friend whose son had met Rachel at a party one night. Elizabeth told Helen the son was mistaken, she knew of an affair, a recent affair with an older man, which had upset Rachel. But when she thought about the supposed affair later, when Helen had gone and she was sitting in the damp sitting-room in Devon waiting for Nicky to bring in the logs, she realised she had never been introduced to the older man, had only seen him from a distance dropping Rachel off at the awful house in London one weekend when she was visiting. Later, Rachel had cried and Elizabeth, wanting to be sensitive, had held her hand and told her love was difficult and all men were bastards and made her a cup of coffee with rum in it, for shock.
When Elizabeth had told her husband what Helen had said about Rachel he had been quite furious, as though she and her friend had conspired to upset him. Elizabeth explained that she didn’t think it was true about Rachel and reminded him of the man she had seen from the window in London, and though she didn’t mention the bastard remarks, she said she had been there for Rachel, she said she had cared. Nicholas was pale and his mouth was small, and in bed that night he slept in his clothes and curled away from her when she touched him. Elizabeth sat up until the thin morning light bled at the edges of the velvet curtains.
For days, she had wondered how to talk to Rachel. It wasn’t the sort of thing you could easily discuss on the telephone: ‘By the way, Helen tells me you’re a lesbian.’ When she did, finally, raise the subject very gently, Rachel had apparently already been told by Helen’s son that Elizabeth was ‘on the warpath’.
‘I most certainly am not.’ Elizabeth had been forced onto the back foot and decided she was never confiding in Helen again, especially since her friend had seemed so smug and understanding when she had absolutely no reason to be for hadn’t her own husband left her for an African woman who wore a turban? ‘I’m worried about you.’
Rachel had laughed. ‘I knew you’d be like this.’
Elizabeth had expected her daughter to be defensive but she could not help taking the criticism personally. All she wanted was for Rachel to be as happy as possible and those types of people, not that there was anything wrong with being gay, could never be fulfilled.
‘It’s a
cul-de-sac, darling.’ Elizabeth had heard a woman on Radio 4 say this during Any Answers and it had struck a chord.
There was a loud sigh from the receiver. ‘What’s that supposed to mean? Are you talking about children? You’ve spent the last five years telling me not to get pregnant.’
Rachel had always taken the most obvious route between two points. There was no nuance to the child, no imaginative give.
Slumped against the mirror in her bedroom, Elizabeth allowed herself a small recollection. The beautiful Turkish boy, or was he Greek, deftly unclasping her bikini top. He had not lacked imagination. She forced the memory back into its proper place; buried beneath a life’s good behaviour. Rachel was nothing like that boy because she had never met him and did not know about him. She was Nicholas’s daughter and she took after him. Her mother hadn’t believed in genetic personalities and neither did she. ‘We are more than the sum of our parts,’ Elizabeth said to anyone who ventured an opinion on evolutionary biology, and sometimes when they hadn’t.
A hard vibration from her purse on the wooden table helped her to turn away from the Cypriot liaison. She pulled her mobile phone out of the now-full bag with difficulty, wiped at the lipstick stain that had bloomed around the clasp, and stared at the text.
We need to go before I eat the car seat
Nicholas had taken to texting her from various locations around the house, often with requests for her presence, occasionally with messages of what she decided to take as love. Nevertheless, she understood the running joke for her husband was a reference to her timekeeping. When she complained about his habit he said, ‘You’ve always responded better to literature than to life’ which, she had to admit, was true.
‘What on earth are you doing?’ Elizabeth asked when she walked outside, only a few minutes later. The edge of the garden was hazy with purple light from the ocean sunset. Nicholas sat behind the steering column of the jeep with a book balanced on the wheel and a torch between his teeth.
‘What I’m always bloody doing. My angel,’ Nicholas added, removing the torch. Elizabeth heard the deep intake of his breath. ‘We don’t have to go, you know.’ Another breath. ‘If you’re worried.’
‘She’s your daughter, too.’
Nicholas put the car into gear and pulled out of the drive.
At the top of the hill, Elizabeth looked back at the house. The pool was a glass-blue rectangle lit from below. From a distance, the sunbeds were doll furniture arranged in a row as though a crowd of tiny tourists were about to arrive. Elizabeth stared at the garden until the car rounded the corner. The loungers had been her idea, a memory from a teenage holiday in the South of France. You didn’t need sunbeds in Tiverton. Or the Brazilian coast as it turned out. Still, she had wanted them and they looked pretty by the pool even if it was far too hot when the sun was out ever to lie on one. That was hardly the point, she told Nicholas when he had refused to help her buy cushions to soften her new furniture. The sunbeds were decorative, a promise of something. ‘Melanoma,’ her husband said, and she had been forced to take a taxi to Fortaleza.
The beds weren’t supposed to be occupied in any case; they were a fantasy she had nursed since that adolescent summer. She had developed her own theory of attraction as she’d sat in her sensible one-piece with her mother’s handbag tucked under the plastic stripping that bound the lounger together. All the drinking and smoking and reading and flirting that happened while the sunbathers paraded and dipped and posed, their taut skin golden in the sunlight, their eyes sparkling from the shimmer of the water. Whole days spent going back and forth from the bar to the pool to the chairs, and the sunbeds themselves were the source of the activity, the houses to which the bronzed ones retired and rested, collected their cigarettes, their sun cream, a hat or a book. The sunbed was a glimpse into the soul of the occupant and Elizabeth longed for a future when she would have her own perfect objects to represent her true self. When that happened, the right man would walk past her sunbed and fall in love with her, just on the evidence of her taste. She wouldn’t even need to be there.
On the days she managed to leave her parents and step down to the pool to reserve her own place at the party, she would study the empty beds and consider the lives of the absent tenants. She began to award herself points for guessing correctly. Three points for age, two points for glamour or beauty, for which she had a list of criteria, and one point for gender which was the easiest, though she had been surprised a few times by a man collecting his handbag or a woman’s trousers folded over the back of the chair. The Mediterranean temperament was different, she had realised; some of the women didn’t even shave.
Perhaps that was where Rachel had got it from; a throwback to the man in the cloak. Nobody else in her family was gay, or if they were they didn’t shout about it. So tedious, having to explain to her in-laws and the book club and even the postman, who asked after Rachel, that her daughter was a lesbian. Not that she used that ugly word with all its connotations of big-boned women striding about. What had that to do with her lovely daughter, who was soft and curvy and hardly ever raised her voice? It was a label, this word, and yet Rachel insisted on using it at the least opportunity.
‘Oh, mum, just say I’m a lesbian,’ Rachel told her when Elizabeth asked what she should tell the hairdresser who wanted to know why she hadn’t seen Rachel for so long.
‘What on earth has that got to do with it?’ Elizabeth asked. ‘And why do you want the whole world to know what is personal to you?’
‘Do you worry about telling people you’re straight? Your daughter is a lesbian,’ Rachel said, ‘I realise it’s hard for you to say. Try and say it on your own sometime. Or in your head.’ Her daughter took a deep breath. ‘Try and … imagine saying it.’
Elizabeth paused. Rachel was completely impossible to reason with when she was in this mood. ‘You’re so funny, darling.’
Neither of them laughed.
‘Cheer up, my turtle dove.’ Nicholas swung the jeep along the main road and swerved to avoid the potholes. ‘Old Bath knows how to throw a party.’
Elizabeth experienced a vision of the evening ahead. The unavoidable knowledge that a certain type of Englishman, rather than mouldering in Hampstead or Lyme Regis, had upped sticks to the north-east coast of Brazil, haunted her. The bourgeois life she had tried to cut away had sprung up in thickets within weeks of their arrival. She had not known about the alternative art scene nestled amongst the dunes, though Nicholas must have heard of the painters and novelists who had relocated. Elizabeth had imagined the move entirely original. To be faced with, she had to be honest, a fairly desperate crowd of middle-aged, middle-class Bohemians in search of a last fling with their youth, had irritated Elizabeth beyond measure and though she didn’t like to judge, she recognised the tastefully distressed houses and raucous dinners as evidence of a dying tribe.
Those who cannot forget the past, she thought as they approached the turning to the Olivers’ to find a string of overweight couples in sandals wending their way towards the house, were doomed to repeat themselves. You had to be inventive, to find new interests, or you might as well give up.
‘Shoot me when my bottom looks as big as hers,’ Elizabeth told her husband when they passed Dorcas Knowles. ‘You can drive up to the front door.’
At the end of the lane, the Olivers’ house leant toward the North Atlantic. Flaking plaster walls and columns were lit by exterior lamps scattered throughout dense foliage that rose up from the sheer cliff at the end of the garden. The effect was one of tropical disarray; as though the house were being reclaimed by the landscape and the entire property were on an inevitable trajectory falling into the sea below.
Elizabeth’s vertigo surged and she clutched at the walking stick she had had the good sense to bring. Of course, she hardly needed a stick; it was more of a prop to make sure she was given one of the few comfortable chairs the Olivers possessed and she enjoyed the attention such a small inconvenience brought. The stick had been Nic
ky’s idea. They had been to lunch in Aracati, the only Italian restaurant within an hour’s drive, and she had suggested he bring the car round from the street where they parked. She had the smallest twinge in her knee, which she may have exaggerated slightly because Nicholas got so cross when she asked for help with anything. He had returned half an hour later with the car and an enormous disability contraption on wheels ‘to help her get about’.
‘Very amusing.’ Elizabeth hadn’t known whether to laugh or cry.
‘Always thinking of you, my sweet.’
‘Well, you can take it back.’
They had. But in the shop the pretty walking stick with a polished handle caught her eye and Nicky had purchased it with a flourish and a kiss and made her promise never to hit him with it.
‘You can take it to your dance classes. I’m sure one of your Latin lovers could do with a swipe or two.’
‘Capoeira. And,’ an enigmatic smile, ‘possibly.’
She encouraged her husband’s jealousy, and as he never visited her at the studio there was no need for him to know that the few men who attended her class were a little older than him. Or that the only man younger than her was now called Sofia and had breasts.
The jeep came to an abrupt halt immediately outside the Olivers’ front door causing a woman holding a drinks tray to jump.
‘Close enough?’
‘Just about.’ Elizabeth shook her head as she dismounted. Nicholas loved to make a point however much extra work was involved. In the case of his extreme stop, he was obliged to get out of the car and apologise to the waitress, before finding somewhere more suitable to park and walking back to the house with Dorcas Knowles at his side, keen to introduce him to a new sculptor she had discovered who only worked with human secretions.
‘He’s a true fallen-fruit artist.’
‘A fruit, in any case.’
‘Found substances, Nicholas. An artisan of the soul.’
Elizabeth was already sitting on a bench in the hallway. Two glasses of red wine held aloft.