Beth gaped. ‘But who are all these people?’ she almost shouted.
Tamara laughed. ‘Beth, regulate yourself!’
‘And what about me?’
‘I can’t have you.’
‘But—’
Tamara shrugged. ‘Rules are for fools.’
‘That’s what – the axiom of a consultant clinical psychologist?’
‘Remember it.’
‘Do – do you actually have affairs?’
Tamara’s smile flashed across her face.
‘I’m a little badly behaved sometimes.’
‘But you can’t!’ Beth said.
‘What? Is this the nineteenth century?’
Beth shook her head.
‘Are you proposing we all stay tethered to one person, no illuminating side trips anywhere?’
‘Yes,’ barked Beth.
Tamara laughed. ‘Get back to your lord and master, my darling,’ she said. ‘And to your century.’
‘Oh, piss off,’ said Beth.
Tamara gave a tilt of a smile. A flicker of pain was subdued with a shrug, and she rose and began to move away.
‘No, no,’ said Beth. She stood and pulled her arm. ‘You make me feel like a fucking schoolboy,’ she said.
‘I’d quite like to fuck a schoolboy. Just once.’
Beth half-laughed, gritting her teeth. ‘You’re impossible. I think I’m going to go now.’
‘Don’t go,’ said Tamara. ‘Look,’ she said, pausing. ‘I’m not happy. That’s the thing.’
‘Why? Tamara.’
‘I’m—’ She cleared her throat. ‘Jealous,’ she said.
‘You’re jealous? About?’
‘You and Sol. You being with someone else, because I want to talk to you all the time.’
‘Do you?’
‘Yes. That level of understanding. I don’t think I have it with anyone else. Certainly not … at home. Please don’t go away for the summer.’ Tamara breathed slowly. ‘Oh, I’m so stupid. I despair over myself sometimes, Beth.’
‘Tamara! This doesn’t sound like you. Don’t say tha—’
‘I’m trying to be honest. I push you away. I push everyone away. Because I can’t bear being rejected. I just can’t face that pain. You are with your husband.’
‘So are you,’ said Beth, as she had said before.
‘I have got to go,’ said Tamara.
***
‘From tomorrow, let’s see each other, go to dinner, go exploring,’ Beth said to Sol later.
He looked at her, shook his head, breathed out through his nose.
‘You know – Bet,’ he said solemnly. ‘You know we all think separations happen to other people. But what if—’
‘No!’ she said.
He raised his eyebrows in the mirror as he brushed his teeth. ‘We have to take nothing for granted.’
She nodded, kissed his neck. In her pocket was Tamara’s napkin from earlier, two overlapping impressions of her lips, a fainter one over a bloodier one, and Beth hesitated then flushed it down the loo.
She kissed him suddenly, fully and wetly on the mouth, and in stages they moved towards the bed.
Beth chased the small flame, breathing him in, tasting his neck, until she found it, wobbling semi-hidden, and made it grow. She forcibly switched her mind into the place of desire and felt the old lapping just begin to carry her. He was hot; she licked the salt from him, but there was another smell that was not there, a sweet musk that held blacker depths, and Beth began to talk to Sol to banish her thoughts. ‘I love you,’ she said, and, ‘I need you,’ without meaning to.
But as he entered her, distortions pooled into her mind again: those women she chased by the river, little glimpses in darkness, and the horror, the eternal chasing. Tamara the elusive. The shrink’s hands, the make-up, the womanly slides of her voice, all came to her though she fought it, images speeding, battering, and then, as she gave in, charging through her.
She and Sol gazed at each other.
EIGHTEEN
Beth didn’t contact Tamara, and there were no messages from her.
By the weekend, Fern seemed almost bowed with scorn for her mother, as though her disgust was distorting the very set of her body.
‘Who is that text from?’ said Fern a week later, her sharp eyes looking across the table.
Beth jolted at the sound of her voice, and snatched her phone back. ‘You speak!’ she said, swallowing.
‘I need you,’ Fern quoted. Her neat little voice was an icicle. ‘When are you around?’
‘What the hell are you doing?’
‘Who is that? Who is “T” something?’
‘No one,’ said Beth.
Fern went bright red. ‘Oh my God. I think I know what – what you—’
‘There’s nothing to worry about,’ said Beth. ‘You misunderstood.’
Fern was trembling. ‘“When women are being cruel to their children, it’s usually because their minds are somewhere else”,’ she said in a disquieting monotone.
‘What? What do you mean, Fern?’
‘I hate you.’
‘God. What is this, Fern? How am I “cruel”?’
‘To people. Dad. You never took me back to see my friends from my first school. You never even let me meet my grandmother—’
‘I’ve tried to explain to you about that. We—’
‘No one. You care about no one, and now Dad’s all quiet – and you probably don’t care about that. I hate you. I really hate you. Dad’s much nicer.’
Beth stepped back.
‘I don’t want you here.’
‘Don’t you?’ Beth’s mouth fell open.
‘Nor in America. So you don’t have to see me then, either.’
‘Fern,’ said Beth, ‘don’t be ridiculous! I want to see you above anything else!’
Fern stared at Beth. ‘That’s not quite true, though, is it?’
Beth drew in her breath. ‘I thought I was too nice.’
‘Yeah. And too horrible.’
‘You don’t want me? Anywhere? With you?’
‘No. Why would I?’
Beth reeled. Lizzie’s back through her bedroom window, the wave, the hospital later.
‘Dad and I are seriously fine,’ said Fern. ‘I’m cool. Just leave me alone. Fuck off if you want to.’
Beth’s mobile rang. Tamara B. She rejected the call.
Fern stormed upstairs.
The phone rang again. ‘Beth,’ Tamara whispered. Her voice was croaky. ‘I can’t do this any more.’
‘What? Tamara?’ she said.
‘You don’t contact me. It’s breaking me.’
‘Oh, sweetheart,’ said Beth. Her legs were instantly unsteady.
‘Can you talk? Sol’s not there?’ A sound-littered London at night backed her voice.
‘He’s out.’
‘That’s luck. Can you see me? Please.’
‘Fern’s here. In her room.’
Tamara was silent.
‘Where are you?’ said Beth.
‘Near you. It took me so long to gather the strength to ring you.’
‘Let me try to work this out …’ said Beth, stretching and grabbing some paper. She paused, hesitated at the bottom of the stairs, then ran back and scribbled Fern a note.
FERN Popped out to get milk. Back in a few minutes. Ignore door if it rings. Ring my mobile if need. Love xxxxxx.
***
Sefton Park came to her, as it often did. After her first sighting, Beth had looked several times. There had been no one to ask about the possibility of Lizzie Penn being in Liverpool. Mentioning her mother’s name to her father would have been like pressing the tip of a knife into him.
Then, just once, she had thought she saw a figure across the park in the dusk, a slim, hurried figure who could have been her mother, and the figure disappeared behind drifts of falling dark somewhere near where she had been before, and then there was nothing: the same hostility, or silence, greeting pr
essed doorbells, and Beth knew she would have to give up and preserve her sanity. Or to try again.
***
Beth gazed at her note to Fern, put it on the table, listened to the silence upstairs, then screwed up the paper and threw it into the fireplace. She told Tamara that it was impossible to meet her, that she needed to be with Fern, and Tamara was quiet and then said that she understood.
After that, there was silence. On the fourth day, Beth turned off her phone when she was with her family, to live in a pure state liberated from the nagging of anticipation, and she loved Solomon Jacob Brierley. She worked in the mornings, and she no longer went to the Thames, added finishing touches to what she had done of her river series in her studio. It was the undertow that she found, and beneath that, another layer of terror, hinted at: uncertain depths beneath the air bubbles. Her gallerist was about to make a studio visit to see what she had done so far, and she swayed between nerves and certainty and then new doubts. She had taken risks. This was not Ghost Walks. But then it was not City Lies either. Aranxto had asked to see her latest work, but instinct stopped her, and his irritation added to the unease between them that had been growing all year.
One day, fetching some old photographs of South Liverpool she had lent Aranxto, she was passed on the stairs by a man whose blank-eyed gaze announced to her with something close to certainty that he was a rent boy, Aranxto’s series of smirks confirming the supposition.
‘Lovely,’ she muttered to him, raising her eyebrows.
It took a moment for her meaning to sink in. ‘You need a fuck yourself,’ he snapped.
‘Shut up, Aranxto,’ said Beth. ‘In fact, fuck you.’ And she grabbed her photographs and started to leave.
She put her head back round the door.
‘And stop messaging my daughter.’
Aranxto paused, indignant.
‘No good. I know your sheepish face. Before you do the pissed-off look. Why would you message Fern?’
‘Why in hell not? I’m her godfather.’
‘Are you? The least attentive godfather on earth.’
She slammed the door.
The tension between them was a remnant from earlier times. Her worst row with Aranxto, some years before, had been so brutal that he still attempted to punish her in subtle ways once their estrangement was over, and she had never fully trusted him since. He had even apparently found housing association accommodation nearby for Jack Dorian’s ex-wife, a move intended merely, Beth was certain, to irritate her and thereby entertain him.
She looked at her emails quickly. There was nothing from Tamara, increasing her resolve with a kick of pain. And yet, as time progressed, it occurred to her that in resisting the therapist who had saved her, she was demonstrating nothing but ingratitude. The echo of her own mother’s accusation caught her in the throat.
‘Ungrateful.’
Was there, after all, truth there? She lay in bed and the Lizzie she had been warding away came to her, the first of the scenes involving Lizzie she really didn’t want to think about.
***
‘I’m so sorry, Bet,’ Sol had said, over thirteen years before, soon after Beth had refused Lizzie’s request to see the baby Fern. ‘I need to tell you your mother’s in hospital.’
Beth felt the blood draining from her face. She paused for several seconds. ‘How do you know?’
He breathed out impatiently. ‘The usual circuitous. Via the douche of a half-brother. Who is sick himself. He got the hospital to call.’
‘Here?’ said Beth blankly.
‘Your gallery. I’m sorry.’
‘What is wrong?’ she said at last.
‘She had a stroke, honey. Sit down.’
‘How?’
‘We don’t have all the details yet.’
‘“We”?’
He shook his head. ‘They. The brother.’
‘She seemed quite – fit – when I saw her only what, six, seven days ago. Older, but she could still move quickly.’ Beth was shaking hard and fast.
‘I know, honey,’ said Sol gently.
‘This is what she has left? An ill half-brother in Aigburth. Which hospital’s she in?’
‘The Royal Liverpool.’
‘Why?’
‘The gallery thinks she was transferred there from London where she was briefly and where it happened. Her official address is Liverpool.’
‘What?’ said Beth. ‘You don’t mean—’
‘Not your father’s address. She said she has no family up there, but—’
‘But she does, she does,’ cried Beth.
‘She doesn’t,’ said Sol firmly.
Beth opened her mouth. Tears were running down her face, leaving an itchy residue.
‘Seems Aranxto is visiting his mother and will see her.’
‘Aranxto? Oh God. I so don’t want—’
‘There’s more,’ said Sol rapidly. ‘Honey, I hardly want to burden you with this. She married. Again, apparently.’
Beth drew in her breath. The past travelled by her as a sequence: a string of paper cut-outs in trousers: men, more men. Lizzie had jumped so swiftly from one to another, from her father to Colin, the man she had run off with, to any number of unknowns, the paper figures torn in Beth’s mind as they were discarded in pieces on the floor.
‘Who?’
‘Some man she married some time ago who seems pretty useless, has an address on the city outskirts but is largely itinerant, in London. Albert Crayer. Called her brother. I’m so sorry. Bet. Come here, honey.’
He held her almost too tightly; she struggled to breathe, but it blanked the news for comforting seconds. She pulled away with a jolt.
‘How ill?’
‘She’s— She sustained some brain damage.’
‘I need to get there now.’
‘On no account should you see her,’ said Sol.
‘I have to!’
‘Bill can see her. His kids.’
‘None of them do. Don’t bother Dad with this,’ she said in a rush. ‘It would so pain him. And she doesn’t deserve it.’
‘I agree. She doesn’t deserve you, either.’
Beth shook her head. She started the laptop and began to look up train times. Her fingers tapped. She heard her own breathing. She turned abruptly.
‘Why – why do they think she had a stroke, now?’
Sol paused for a long time. He shook his head. Sadness travelled over his face, and he closed his eyes. He loves me, thought Beth at the sight of his expression, as though it were a new realisation. It filled her with amazement that anyone could love her as he did.
‘Let’s just focus on the now,’ he said.
‘No! Sol. Why? It’s so sudden. Sol?’
He leaned over her at the computer, and wrapped her in his arms.
‘It was an accident. A stupid accident.’
‘What kind of accident?’ said Beth very quietly and slowly.
‘Christ, Bet. I so fucking wish you didn’t have to hear this. She went into a pond. She—’
‘Oh, Jesus, Jesus. What day?’ said Beth, grabbing Sol’s arm.
He pulled her harder towards him. ‘The second, apparently. Last Monday.’
She lowered her head on to her computer. She tried to breathe.
***
Another message arrived on Beth’s phone. Tamara B. You break my heart.
Beth threw herself into clearing the table, into ordering primer and paying bills in a switchback of remorse and desire. Tamara was overworked and vulnerable, unhappily married and gave her all to others.
‘I have to meet the shrink,’ she said to Sol after some time. ‘Tamara.’ And she felt as though she trampled over both him and their precious closer marriage in so little time. ‘Soon.’ She coughed. ‘This evening—’
‘For a dinner?’ said Sol after some moments, a whiff of frost detectable. ‘Or another appointment?’
Beth stiffened. Her eyes were moist. ‘I won’t be long.’
She w
atched as Sol took his phone out.
‘Oh!’ she said. ‘Fern. I didn’t hear you coming in.’
‘Don’t come in the summer,’ Fern said. ‘I do not want you to come to Oma’s house.’
Beth paled. ‘But of course I—’
‘I want to go only with Dad,’ said Fern in a cold monotone that sounded rehearsed, and yet there was a slight crumpling of her face.
***
‘I don’t think I can stand this much longer,’ Tamara said when she saw her. ‘Being without you. Don’t freeze me out.’
‘I didn’t mean—’ Beth started to say. ‘You too. You do that,’ she said.
‘I know, I’m sorry, I know, I don’t mean to. Let’s make a go of it,’ said Tamara.
‘What?’ said Beth, her voice rising.
‘Please. I can’t hold back any more. Let’s have a try. We’ve never even properly … There’s never any chance. It’s ridiculous. Let’s be together.’
‘What, I queue up behind … Giovanni Lollo – brigida? Your stalker. Your Head of Services who clearly fancies you?’
‘Oh no, please. They mean nothing to me. Beth, please. It’s you I want. They’re all just silly men.’
‘And that bloke who rang you.’
‘Who?’
‘I don’t know. Some man you spoke to on the phone. Who comes up with “delightful activities”.’
‘Oh, I’d forgotten about that. They – any of these men. They mean just nothing to me. I don’t know what gets into me sometimes, I … mess up. I always have. I’m sorry. I’m really sorry, Beth. My love. I don’t know why I do, but it torments me when I do. Please, darling. Be patient with me. I love you so much.’
Tamara gazed at her in the dark, buses, hooting, the silences of the city between.
‘Oh God. Tamara,’ said Beth, and she kissed her, long and hard, and Tamara kissed passionately, and Beth’s knees were liquid. Tamara’s hands were lightly on her breasts, nerves an electric streak.
‘Darling,’ said Tamara between kisses, ‘I’m so sorry if I offended, hurt you. Or – put you off me.I think I behave badly sometimes.’ Her voice wobbled. Her eyes shone. ‘I shouldn’t have told you all that nonsense about all those men. It’s not real. I don’t know why I do these things. I’m – I’m so insecure underneath, really. You know I love you so much.’
The Seduction Page 18