The Things You Do for Love

by Rachel Crowther

  For a few moments they stood a little way apart, watching the roll and suck of the sea, and then Alice turned.

  ‘Home?’ she said, ‘or on?’

  ‘Your call,’ said Lou – conscious, as she so often was these days, of the exact timbre and pitch of her voice.

  ‘Let’s go on, if you’re not too tired,’ said Alice, and she turned towards the cliffs again.

  Deliberately, calmly, Lou fell into step beside her, waiting for the minutes to pass and her heart to subside. The pebbles were layered more thickly now, and by mutual assent they scrambled back to the concrete promenade. Before long it ended in a railed platform from which the next, wilder bit of coastline could be admired, and a path running up towards the grassy clifftop.

  ‘Shall we go up?’ Lou suggested.

  The path was steeper than it looked, but within a few minutes the reward was delivered: an aerial view of Seaford and the Downs in one direction, and in the other a panorama of sea and sky. A fringe of purple flowers ran along the cliff edge, separating the green of the grass from the stark white of the chalk, and in the distance a ferry chugged slowly past, making its way from Newhaven towards the shadow of France on the horizon. Wonderful, Lou thought. Wonderful to be on higher ground, to look down on the town and the beach and the creeping tide. From here, things looked tidy, ordered, explicable, and her misgivings a few minutes before felt unaccountable.

  ‘I need to say something,’ she said, almost without knowing she was going to speak. ‘You may not want to hear it, but . . .’

  Alice turned. ‘Say what?’

  ‘Sorry,’ said Lou. ‘About the baby. About doing it without you.’

  For a long time Alice didn’t answer. The sky was very blue behind her, like a backcloth cut from satin. Her hair, caught up in its habitual loose knot, glinted as though seamed with gold. As Lou stared at her, she was conscious of the tumbling, insistent song of a lark high above, drawing her up and away, and it was as if all the happy memories they had amassed together flowed through her mind, and through Alice’s too, and she stood quite still, daring Alice to throw them away – to cast them over the edge of the cliff and never see them again.

  ‘Everything’s fine,’ Alice said in the end, her voice rougher than usual, blasé in the wrong way.

  ‘It’s quite clearly not,’ said Lou, and the words were clear too, clear and hard as beach pebbles. She moved, half-involuntarily, closer to the edge of the cliff.

  Alice sighed. ‘Well, then,’ she said. ‘What you said just now: Stone’s your thing. You can make it do whatever you want. Don’t tell me that wasn’t a reference to Bacchus.’

  ‘It wasn’t,’ Lou protested. ‘It was just something to say.’

  For several moments Alice looked at her, and then she gave another of those empty smiles.

  ‘Everything’s fine, then,’ she said.

  ‘You know I love you,’ Lou said – but even as the words came out there were those doubts again, those awful possibilities. Alice seemed to be looking at her from a great distance: the space between them, barely a metre, was like a chasm neither of them could cross. She was pregnant and Alice was not, whispered a voice in her head – the same voice that had held sway that fateful night at Veronica Villa. It wasn’t even Alice’s child she was carrying, so what business was it of hers? Shameful thoughts, her conscience protested: why was she listening to them? They reminded her of the trolling a gay woman had been subjected to on the pregnancy forum: What do you expect, going against nature? You’re an aberration and I hope you suffer for it. She’d never taken any notice of crap like that; never thought of the prejudice against lesbians having babies as any different to the prejudice against lesbians doing anything else. But what if some of the doubt and discomfort and distress was down to her, not Alice? What if it was the effect of the hormones, making her . . . more like any other pregnant woman? Driving a wedge between her and Alice? Maybe everyone went through this; maybe straight women had the same feelings about their partners. But she could see that if it was your husband’s child in your belly that would, that must, be a powerful bond, a biological imperative that would . . .

  And then, quite suddenly, she saw herself as a child, white with fury, ripping the hair from a doll Henry had given her; as an adolescent, testing the bite of a blade against her wrist. She remembered the frantic desire to be rescued, the terror of not knowing her way back. This, she thought, was what those experiences had been leading up to. This was the moment when she had to hold tight, to stay away from the cliff. Her head was filled again by the skylark, frenetic with song.

  ‘I want to do this with you,’ she said. ‘I can’t go back now. Can’t we try?’

  For a moment it felt as though she was speaking to a stranger; as though the Alice she’d known had vanished. And then at last, at last, she sensed something loosen in Alice’s body.

  Lou took her hand, and Alice let herself be pulled in close. Lou shut her eyes, cherishing the warmth of Alice’s body against hers. She felt Alice draw in a deep breath and let it out in a long, settling sigh.

  When Lou opened her eyes again she could see the scattered holidaymakers on the beach below them, families and teenage boys and older couples, sitting or walking or kicking balls. All of human life, Lou thought – every stage of it, here by the seaside – and her eyes blurred with tears.

  August 1997

  By the third day, they have established a routine. After breakfast they go down to the beach, provisioned with swimsuits and buckets and sun cream, and they stay there until lunchtime. Back at the house – only a ten minute walk, but uphill, with espadrilles full of sand, so that Kitty invariably pleads to be carried – they make sandwiches for lunch, followed by the expensive Belgian biscuits Henry bought from Fortnum’s as a holiday treat.

  The afternoons are less prescribed, their obligations to the beach having been satisfied. Flora occupies herself with small tasks of the kind she saves up for holidays: copying entries from an old address book to a new one, hesitating over the names of acquaintances she hasn’t seen for years. Henry reads fat volumes of Dickens and Henry James; the same ones, it seems to Flora, that he brings on holiday every year. Lou has brought a pile of books too, this year. She’s starting her GCSE courses next term, and has bought everything on the reading list supplied by her English teacher. Then after an hour or two, Kitty begs Lou to walk to the sweet shop with her, or Henry suggests an outing.

  Yesterday they visited a castle planted squarely on the jut of a cliff top, part of Edward the First’s fortifications against Llywelyn ap Gruffydd, and ate ice creams on a bench looking down from the battlements into the Irish Sea. On the way home they bought fish and chips, and the authentic seaside smell of vinegar and oil and damp newspaper was still lingering in the kitchen when they came down for breakfast this morning.

  Henry is good at family holidays. This morning he’s teaching the girls to skim stones, holding Lou’s hand and demonstrating the angle of the wrist, the knack of the flicking motion. Standing a little way off, Flora can see Lou taking pleasure in the lesson, although she hasn’t managed to get a single stone to bounce yet. Lou’s hair, cut very short at the beginning of the summer, has grown out a little. It suits her like this, Flora thinks. Ruffled by the wind, it looks like the carefully tousled locks of a Greek statue. She’s wearing an old T-shirt, a favourite from last summer, washed out and shapeless but it, too, suits her, the colour like the milky sky of these late summer mornings.

  Flora feels a sudden sense of relief that she can’t, at first, understand. She stares at her daughter for a few moments, letting the emotion take shape in her mind, placing it against the background of the wide beach, the lap of the waves, the cloudless sky. And then it comes to her: Lou is growing up. They have completed almost enough summers, survived almost enough years, to bring her safely to the threshold of adulthood, and she’s becoming the person she is meant to be. A different person from any they could have imagined fourteen years ago, but
the right person, the real Lou, emerging from the jostles and knocks of the childhood they’ve provided for her. Looking at the way she stands, the smile she turns to Henry now, her jaunty shrug as he hands her another stone, Flora is filled with a pride she knows she doesn’t deserve, a feeling so strong that it stops her breath in her throat for a moment. She wants to freeze this scene, keeping everything just as it is, but at the same time she’s impatient to rush time onwards so that she can see what becomes of this miraculous daughter. Will she, too, stand on the beach and watch her children? What will she make of that abrasive intelligence, or the sharp beauty Flora can see she’s poised to claim?

  A shout disturbs her reverie, and she turns to see Kitty, ten yards away, holding a stone of her own.

  ‘Look!’ she’s shouting. ‘Look at me, Daddy!’ – and she lobs the stone so high in the air that it loops up over her head and falls behind her, plopping silently onto the damp sand. Kitty twists wildly, trying to see where it’s gone, and Lou and Henry bend over with laughter – all of them, Flora thinks, like characters from a cartoon, their movements comically exaggerated. Caught between gratification and chagrin, Kitty picks up another stone and throws it towards the sea. Her aim is better this time, and it falls just at the water’s edge, raising a tiny splash.

  ‘Good shot,’ says Henry. ‘We’ll make a bowler of you yet.’

  He hands a pebble to Kitty, but she shakes her head. ‘Find a bigger one, Daddy,’ she says. ‘Show how far you can throw it.’

  Henry grins. He scans the ground, then picks up a stone the size of a cricket ball and weighs it in his hand.

  ‘Like this?’ he asks. ‘This would do for a cannon ball, wouldn’t it? We could fire it at Llywelyn ap Gruffydd.’

  He turns, hooking his arm behind his shoulder and bringing it back up with a showy display of masculine skill. Watching him, Flora can see everything happen in slow motion: the uncurling of his arm, the slight twist of his body at the last minute so that the stone flies off in a different direction from the one they expect – not towards the sea but parallel to the tide line, heading towards the small figures they didn’t realise were there: the two boys squatting over a sandcastle in the distance. There is a long moment of suspense in which the stone describes an arc through the air; a long moment of silence in which any of them might scream but no one does; and then the cannon ball stone – a fleck now against the grey-blue sky – drops back down towards the sand. Before it hits the ground Flora can feel the shock of it reverberating through her body, and can taste the sour tang of tragedy. There is a catapulting of time, forward and backward between the moment before and the moment after – and then nothing.

  Flora shuts her eyes for a second, barely a second, and when she opens them again she wonders if she’s imagined it – the throwing of the stone, or the preternatural calm that followed it – and she strains her eyes towards the boys. They haven’t moved; they’re quite still, crouched low on the sand, and in that moment she can’t tell whether they’re dead, or whether the stone merited no more than a glance as it landed, surely only inches away from them. She starts shouting now – she who is famously calm in the face of calamity – and the girls turn towards her, the same bewildered expression on both their faces. And then Henry, who has been frozen in the position of the thrower since the stone left his hand, starts running across the sand.

  *

  ‘Frankly,’ Henry says as he comes back towards them, his face stupid with relief, ‘it would have been more miraculous if I had hit them, the only people on this huge empty beach. A chance in a million – you could work out the odds, Lou, given the radius of the throw and –’

  ‘I don’t give a damn about the maths, Henry,’ Flora snaps, her heart still throbbing with fury and disbelief. ‘The point is that you threw that stone knowing you might hit someone. Might kill them.’

  ‘That thought wasn’t exactly in my mind,’ Henry says. He dares a wink at Kitty, and Flora almost spits at him.

  ‘Well, it should have been. God, think of the consequences, if you’d . . . What on earth possessed you? With the children around and –’

  ‘There’s no need to be melodramatic,’ Henry says. ‘No harm done.’

  Flora stares at him. The wind has picked up: it scoops eddies of sand and cold air against their bare legs as they stand among the debris of their morning at the seaside. ‘That’s not worthy even of you,’ she says. ‘I got away with it, so who cares? I suppose that’s been your motto all along, you – fuckwit.’

  Lou’s eyes widen, and Flora feels herself trembling.

  ‘If you say so.’

  ‘Don’t be so bloody glib. Can’t you just admit – can’t you for once take responsibility for . . .’

  ‘I’ll admit to whatever you like, Flora.’ He meets her eyes, a questioning look on his face. Are we really going to do this? it says. On the beach, in front of the children? The girls’ eyes are on her too. She’s the one misbehaving, Flora thinks, looking at their tense faces. She’s the one making a scene. She wants to weep, suddenly. She shuts her mouth tight and bends to gather up towels and buckets, cramming them back into the flowery beach bag while her family stands and watches her.

  *

  As they make their way back to the house they are silent, all of them, but the echo of their voices hangs in the air, and distilling from them the unavoidable fact that the day, the whole holiday, has been tainted.

  Flora realises, as they approach the straggle of shops, that she’s still shaking, and she knows it’s from the shock of her own over-reaction as much as the knowledge – still sharp and clear in her mind’s eye – of what might have been; what nearly was. She has spent years ignoring what might have been, and even what might be, what’s out of sight, but she’s been tripped up this morning. Her daughters have seen more than she wanted them to.

  She makes an effort to gather herself, preparing to meet the eyes of the cluster of people standing outside the post office with a smile. But as they come nearer she can hear the hushed voices, feel the sense of shock in the air, and her blood runs cold. No, no, she thinks – she wants to tell them they’ve made a mistake, heard the wrong story – the boys are fine, it was a close shave but nothing more – unless – a terrible thought now – perhaps it was Henry who was mistaken? Perhaps he couldn’t face up to what had happened?

  ‘What?’ she says, involuntarily. The man nearest her looks up from the newspaper they have all been studying, and she realises there’s a radio on, a tinny voice coming out of the centre of the huddle.

  He gives her a look of sympathy, or something like it. Fellow feeling.

  ‘Terrible, isn’t it?’ he says.

  ‘What?’ Flora says again, her voice shrill now, ready to defend her family.

  The man frowns slightly, as though he can’t believe she doesn’t know. ‘Princess Diana,’ he says. ‘Dead, isn’t she? In Paris, with Dodi.’

  ‘Princess Diana?’ Flora echoes.

  ‘A car crash,’ says an older woman Flora recognises from one of the shops. ‘Terrible. Such a waste.’

  Flora glances at Henry and sees, behind his expression of concern, the shadow of a grin.

  ‘What’s happened?’ Kitty asks. ‘Is Princess Diana really dead?’

  ‘Apparently, my precious.’ Henry puts a hand on her head.

  And that, Flora sees, is that. The non-event of the stone that hit no one has been dwarfed by a public tragedy. The moral of their story has been drowned by the myriad voices of mourning and speculation that will fill the world’s airspace for days, weeks, months to come. As the tide turns, preparing to fill the moat dug by the small boys on the beach – as Lou turns another infinitesimal degree towards adulthood, and Kitty glimpses the unpredictability of the world – a life is snuffed out far away, on the television, and its reverberations overrun everything else. Flora is grateful that the hand of Fate didn’t fall differently that morning, of course she is, but she feels something unfamiliar stirring inside her. Sh
e feels sorry for Princess Diana, but even sorrier for herself.

  23

  ‘Julia Hoxton?’ said Alice. ‘Isn’t she an opera singer?’

  ‘A conductor.’ Lou read the letter again. Why her, she was wondering? Had this woman written to Flora and Kitty as well? ‘Quite a famous conductor,’ she said. ‘I didn’t realise she knew Henry.’

  Her father’s musical friends had come to Orchards occasionally, but Lou couldn’t remember Julia Hoxton being among them. There was, of course, one obvious explanation for that. She thought of the women lurking at the fringes of Henry’s funeral, women wearing too much makeup or too little, defiantly unaccompanied.

  ‘Are you upset?’ Alice asked. ‘It sounds like a nice thing to do, organising a concert for him.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Lou. ‘I suppose it is.’

  ‘You must be proud,’ said Alice.

  Lou considered this. She’d never been proud of Henry in the same way she’d been proud of Flora, despite the glamour of his work – being on the radio, even the television sometimes. But he’d been a staunch supporter of musical education, too, and presumably that was why he was remembered fondly by people like Julia Hoxton.

  ‘She wants to raise money for a prize in his memory,’ she said, reading the letter again.

  Alice yawned. In her pyjamas, with her hair loose and wild, she looked every inch the dishevelled sculptor. Six forty-five was too early for her, but she got up each morning now to see Lou off. Part of a compact, Lou thought, that neither of them had voiced and both were trying hard to stick to.

  ‘Would your father have liked that?’