Ring me? Sofia had texted. ASAP? she had added later.
‘You’re beginning to worry now, right?’ said Beth. She pressed the inside of her fingernails, removing fragments of soap that she stared at under the lamplight. Traces of Tamara Bywater?
She felt a tensing of her throat as she looked out at the sky with its inks. She left a further message. It was possible Fern was running away from her.
The scent of Tamara came back to her and bolted straight down her body, striking her knees. And then guilt about Lizzie hit her more brutally.
She swallowed. ‘Where is she?’ she said.
‘Don’t stress yet,’ said Sol, ever calm, but she could hear his anxiety beneath.
Her phone rang. She jumped. ‘Oh. Sofia,’ she said. She bit her lip.
‘Take it,’ said Sol, and walked into the kitchen.
Beth hesitated. ‘Hello?’ she said unsteadily.
‘I’m sorry,’ said Sofia. ‘But I think you may be able to help.’
‘Oh.’
‘Dr Tamara Bywater,’ she said, and there was a pause.
‘Yes,’ said Beth. She caught her breath. They had never said her name to each other.
‘There are various concerns about her. They’re just looking for the – well, excuse. The concrete reason, really … ’
‘For what?’ said Beth, dumbly. She stared at the towpath, the dark shapes of its reinforcements and creeper like human, or monstrous, forms.
‘To – they need to get her – well, stop her, terminate her contract. I’m sorry. I hope you don’t mind me calling you. I knew that she was your psychol—’
‘Just a minute,’ said Beth. ‘I mean, sorry, but I need to call you back.’
She tried Fern’s number several more times. She walked through the house, pledging ideal behaviour and payments to charity as she pressed herself against walls before returning to the windows. She stared at the dark. Aranxto walked along the other bank, distinguishable by his height and gait, his clothes smudging against the walls so he was a slow blur of black on charcoal.
She stood there and gazed for some time at him. He came back to her as a boy. That funny, scrawny outcast so few had understood, who had been her friend from the age of four. Aranxto at tea at home, flattering her mother, who had found him appealing when most parents did not. Other images came to Beth. Always, Sefton Park. Was Tamara Bywater right? Had Lizzie Penn been there to watch over her? Beth had never known what her father might have said to her mother, what actions he might have threatened. Had Tamara given her that gift? Tamara Bywater. The one who had rescued her, bestowed upon her insights that turned her world around.
Sefton Park. Till then my windows ache. Beth’s jaw slackened. Was that what her mother had said to her, calling out, in the nature reserve? She knew the shape of those words, knew them so well. There were lines she was constantly trying to remember from when her mother had followed her, shouting at her, through the nature reserve. But had she invented them? It was so hard, with Lizzie Penn, to know what was true and what had been distorted through too much thinking afterwards. Fern. Fern had quite possibly said those words when she had called her. Beth googled the line. So I wait for you like a lonely house till you will see me again and live in me. Till then my windows ache.
Beth crouched on a chair and put her head between her legs.
Fern as a baby in a buggy. Peach with eyelashes. A possession to pluck.
Beth stood up again. Aranxto was still there, smoking on the towpath: Aranxto the celebrated exhibitionist who lapped up his wealth but could never sit comfortably in its presence. Aranxto in his kitchen providing fry-ups to local down-and-outs, to male prostitutes, to adoring old ladies until he tired of them. Old ladies. That inexplicable text to Fern, and then more. How many texts? He turned on Beth when she attempted to resist his casual superiority and escape his influence. The quasi-brother who wanted her under his thumb. He had punished her in barely distinguishable ways for years.
‘Aranxto,’ she called loudly through the window, the evening chilling. He stopped, his body language uneasy even in the dark.
Half-memories floated like sketches, usually discarded; so rarely consolidating into paint layers that nudged those first thoughts into different directions. Pochades, notes, daydreams, nightmares.
‘You don’t speak to your own mother,’ Fern had said. ‘… She might be lonely … What if Grandad’s a neglecter as well?’
‘A neglecter?’ Beth had said, but Fern was veering into another diatribe of non sequiturs and blame whose logic was hard to follow.
‘So why don’t we ever see her?’ said Fern.
TWENTY-FOUR
‘You shit-stirring, cunting bastard,’ said Beth when Aranxto arrived at the house.
He moved his head as though he had been slapped.
‘I know what you’ve done.’
‘Uh?’ he said.
‘Fern’s very late. I suspect you know exactly where she is likely to be.’
‘You – why would I know?’
‘Exactly. Your sheepish face. Your sheepish face actually looks like a sheep. You think I ever trust that? Ever ever.’ She shook him. She lifted her hand, paused in the air, lowered it. ‘Show me,’ she said, and she strode beside him, speaking to him only to urge haste.
‘How do you know?’ said Aranxto eventually in the falsetto that emerged when he was nervous or about to lie. He coughed.
‘I have worked it out. Good God. How could you do that to me? This has given me almost a year of terrible anxiety about Fern. God knows what it’s given her. Because that woman is not well. She is not good for anyone. She—’
‘Someone needed to give the poor old lady a home,’ he said, tailing off as they walked under the bridge and along decrepit cut-throughs in the direction of Fern’s school. They walked past old railway structures, sidings, bridges tangled in bindweed.
‘Oh Jesus. I’m right. It is that same housing co-op, right? Jack’s ex? Where the manager arse-licks you. You abuse your power, Aranxto.’
‘What power is that?’
‘You abuse your fame. Your wealth. You know that. This ridiculous celebrity. Just because you’re a snivelling little Scouser poof underneath all this who hates himself.’
‘I could have you up in front of the LGBT police for that one.’ He strode ahead, his breath uneven.
‘I don’t give a flying fuck. Why would you do this? Bring an ill and unstable pensioner down from Liverpool? Severely impacting on all our lives. The rows this has caused me and Sol. The suspicion towards Fern. Where is this godforsaken place?’ Beth was shivering. ‘You really think this is a safe journey for a child in the dark?’
‘I felt sorry for Mrs—’
‘Mrs who? I bet you don’t even know her later married name, do you? Mrs who?’
Aranxto walked silently through the bridge shadows.
‘You total steaming turd. Here?’
He stopped on Lyndhurst Place in front of a block of flats of fading red brick, satellite dishes, sooty marigolds, folded into a knot of St Pancras.
‘All the times my daughter must have walked alone, in the dark, along here. Aged thirteen. Twelve in fact? Jesus. Being influenced. Probably filled with terrible guilt and a sense of duty, knowing Lizzie Penn. While I waited at home.’
‘She wanted to see her granddaughter …’ Aranxto’s voice weakened.
‘Just fuck off.’
Aranxto paused. ‘Sorry,’ he muttered.
‘You wanted to play games. You wanted to play God. You wanted to fuck me over. I will never forgive you. You know that, right?’
Aranxto flicked her a glance, nodded. She walked round the corner and waited. He rang the doorbell.
***
That night, Beth lay on a mattress on Fern’s floor to be near her, to divest Sol of the decision about where to sleep, stroking Fern’s forehead for so long that she could not imagine ever absorbing enough of her scalp scent. They talked into darkness threaded with luminou
s ceiling stars, while Beth murmured questions, drawing out threads of conversation in only the softest tones, seemingly inconsequential. She pieced together a picture from Fern like the most holey puzzle: shards of facts, sentences drowned in tears and slurred into the pillow, sudden clarity, questions that she could not answer, confusions about Instagram direct messages, neighbouring flats, but largely a gabbled tale of a grandmother who had made contact with her granddaughter the summer before, via a young male neighbour on Instagram. ‘I love her,’ said Fern as dawn approached.
‘Do you?’ said Beth blankly.
‘I’m – Mum – I’m frightened of her.’
The Narnia street lamp near Fern’s bedroom beamed lines through her blind on to the wall. The sounds of the canal were absent, the night buses a background rumbling. The descriptions of all that Beth’s mother had said and done ballooned through the night, and there were details that Beth knew were likely to tap and twist at her for the rest of her life: the smell of eucalyptus, the objects on Lizzie’s shelves, Fern’s conviction, finally elaborated upon at dawn, that Beth herself no longer loved her own daughter.
The picture that Fern had painted of her grandmother’s home in a series of hesitations and blurts was ultimately so detailed that Beth felt she almost inhabited it. Number 11 Lyndhurst Place was a small flat: ‘modest’, Fern said Lizzie called it. It contained dusty ballet books, piles of old theatre programmes, poetry, ancient copies of Vogue. What Lizzie referred to as ‘curiosities’ were kept in a row on her bookshelves: miniature binoculars, a tiny shoe, a lump of fool’s gold with a label, hair in a locket, ornaments from a different time that she tried to give Fern. There were cakes and old-fashioned fruit drinks for her on her return from school, and displays of love that had made Fern want to cry. Her voice, said Fern, had been muffled like chocolate mousse or like fluff that came out of the dryer. She said strange things that didn’t always make sense. Lizzie had veiny hands with aubergine-coloured nails, a cat called Madam Purrington, pale eyes. Her limp made her knock into furniture.
And then Fern had asked her not to burn the scented oils that left their smell on her clothes, and Lizzie Penn’s displeasure was manifest, causing a panic of guilt in Fern, a sensation she increasingly experienced despite her grandmother’s kindness.
‘Call me Grandma Elizabeth,’ Lizzie had instructed from the beginning. ‘Ferny’, she always called Fern, ‘my little Ferny’. She sent her cards, phone messages, bought her presents.
She had blushed and smiled and changed her voice every time Aranxto visited. She told many stories: about Beth when she was little, her sweetness, her cleverness, her drawings. But these anecdotes began to be replaced by stories about a misunderstanding in which that same daughter had rejected her own mother with incomprehensible cruelty. How Lizzie had seen Fern as a baby. ‘You were a little apricot,’ she said. ‘An apricot with big blinking eyes. I thought of that every day of my life.’
The secrecy that Lizzie had imposed on Fern had started with the fact of her own proximity, and had grown, grown in so many small stages, from hints and denials to tearful tales, until Fern barely remembered what she had known from where, who might be betrayed, or how to hide her growing anger towards her own mother. Lizzie could barely talk about that painful past without swallowing and turning away.
Fern’s voice in the dawn was in tangles, duvet over words. How could Beth ever prise open a teenage mind? In fragments, in piecing together, sudden clarity, obfuscation, as they murmured to each other through hours. You, Mum, you didn’t want me any more … I want you, it is all I’ve ever wanted, you are all I can think of … You did not. You had texts … I know. I know. I’m sorry … You didn’t want to come to America … I know. I have done wrong … What was it? What did I do to you? ... Nothing. Nothing, Fern. It’s my fault … You neglected me … Oh God. I thought you didn’t want me around, couldn’t bear me near … I didn’t. Because you were cruel. To my grandmother. I thought. Then to my dad, to me. I hated you. You hated me … I loved you. More than anything on this earth. You are who I love … I think Grandma tells lies, misses things out, told stories about you that weren’t the same as each other … I’m so sorry she did any of this, so angry with her … I’m sorry, Mum … No, Fern, it’s me … And me.... You smelled of perfume, you didn’t kiss me any more … I thought you didn’t want me to. You dreamed out of the window … I’m sorry … You never wanted to be in America with us … I’m sorry. Will you ever forgive me? ... I don’t know … I will wait … You know I will … I hope … You didn’t want me, and Grandma did, but then … I wanted you every day, hour, minute … Jemma covered for me. Grandma wanted to see me coming back from school … I know … She sent me cards. She got a flat where she could see you coming back from school … Oh G— … Mum. Mum? Say something? She didn’t see me, though. Mum? …Yes... Wasn’t Grandad angry with her? Complicated? Mum? Mum? ... Oh Fern....She had this love poem about windows, looked for you out of the window. Mum? Say something … God, Fern....Then she had me instead. But she wants to see me all the time. All the time. I’m so guilty. Talk, Mum … I know, Fern. She does that … Mum? … I’m going to sort this … I don’t want her to be sad! But I’m almost scared now … I know. Don’t worry. You are not going to see her … How? ... I’m sorting this … I’m sorry, Mum … I’m sorry. There is absolutely nothing for you to be sorry about. Nothing. Ever. I love you. I love you. I love you.
***
And later in the morning, light-headed with insomnia, Beth looked out at the canal where the weed glared in summer gloom, and she was only grateful. She had her daughter. That was all. That was all.
‘You haven’t slept, have you?’ said Sol.
Beth shook her head.
‘All night?’
Beth gave a small smile, and shook her head again.
She tried to speak. She cleared her throat. Clouds were pressing against the window, and she shivered. ‘Go back, go back to the States with Fern and I’ll follow,’ she said. ‘In a couple of days.’
‘Really?’
She nodded slowly. ‘And after that … stay. It’s your turn,’ she said, trying not to cry. ‘To live where you want. And given Fern’s always begging to live in America—’
‘And you?’
‘I’ll move there too. But …’
‘Say it.’
‘I don’t know how to. I—’
She drew in her breath. She swallowed. He waited.
‘Bet. We’re not going to be together, right? You don’t think we’re going to be together, right?’
She sank her head in her hands. ‘I thought about it all night. As I talked to Fern. About everything else. This. Sorry. I’m not making sense.’
She was crying. The coots called, muffled. The post was coming through the door. All the sounds of the House of Cardigans.
She closed her eyes. She spoke a line she had rehearsed, but she couldn’t finish it. ‘I have to be truthful to this good man I married. I – I—’
‘Please do.’
‘I don’t know if I can be with you. In a true way. Oh, fuck.’
‘I know you don’t, Bet.’
‘Or anyone. I would probably mess up any relationship. I just need to be with my daughter. Show her so much love. Be there forever for her. Both of us do. Our children are all that matter.’
‘I know.’
‘I know you know. And part of that is keeping her from Lizzie Penn. Keeping me from her. Let’s go and live in the States. Apart. I mean – I mean—’ She stumbled. ‘But not much. Together and apart. And maybe after time—’
She covered her eyes, tears running down her hands, afraid to look in case he was crying too.
‘It’s your turn to have what you want. All that commuting you’ve done.’ She shook her head, stood up, approached him to hug him, but knew it was wrong. ‘And – and – then you can see your mum and so can Fern, and you all deserve that. I don’t care where I am as long as I have my girl.’
‘Beth.
Bet. Jeez.’
‘I know.’ Beth drew in her breath.
‘I love the House of Cardigans. I love London. You … You know I love you. Don’t make me cry more. However we do it, we’re a family. You and Fern. Laurie … Lizzie Penn is not my family. Never was.’
‘What about the shrink? Psychologist – supposed. Quack.’
‘They are trying to strike her off. I’m not sure I can contribute to that.’
He snorted.
‘I need to sort things out with my mother,’ said Beth.
He nodded. ‘Uh huh. You do.’
‘I need to try to sort myself out.’
‘Uh huh. You do—’
‘I’ll let you say uh huh now.’
***
Beth made her way to Lyndhurst Place, through the canal shadows where the moorhens dipped and the morning joggers stormed past. A Sainsbury’s bag, slimed green, was caught in a willow. She was hollow with lack of sleep.
There was Number 11. She stood at an angle from the house, behind some railings, and steadied her breathing, all the words she had rehearsed for minutes and for decades fusing in her mind, and there, there in that cloud-dulled shade beneath the railway bridges, there was a face in a window. Her mother was looking out. She was contained there, glazed, those old milky eyes trained at the distance, at the past, her chest visibly rising in time to her breathing. The full mouth was wrinkled, the stroke-damaged features less skewed, but strange still, the familiar distorted into the unnerving. She was framed. Beth stood there. She waited. She bent her head, reaching for more air. The years she had spent running after this woman. Once, all she had wanted to do was batter down the door of the house that contained the face in a window. Now, all she wanted to do was leave. There were no words. There were no more words between them.
So I wait for you like a lonely house till you will see me again and live in me. Till then my windows ache.
The Seduction Page 25