***
She walked away, breathing the damp summer air as steadily as she could. She reached in her bag and took out a tissue. ‘That’s not yours, right?’ Fern had said to her in her bedroom the evening before. ‘You wouldn’t buy that pattern.’
Beth shook her head. ‘Clever girl. It belonged to someone I knew,’ she said, but she put it into her bag instead of throwing it away.
‘It is your relationship with yourself that matters,’ Dr Bywater had once said. ‘You have to be at peace with yourself, to love others.’
Beth watched the canal’s flow as she tried to calm her heartbeat, and more words came back, in the swooping soft tones, over different weeks, different times, days, nights. ‘You don’t need others to make you whole. Not your husband, partners, mother. You need only yourself to make you whole. Your special self. Your beautiful self.’
‘No one’s ever called me that.’
‘Your mother didn’t call you that. Others will have. You won’t have been able to hear it.’
Beth held the tissue. Tamara’s. Tamara. And now, ahead of her, Tamara Bywater seemed to be there, gliding along the towpath, into the shadows of the bridge. Was the woman Tamara? Was she in her mind only? Or was she really there, her back to her, winding along the section of the canal where the water rippled lazily around clumps of weed; those miniature islands on which Beth had so often imagined their bodies entwined. Was that swing of hair hers? That dark sweet scent? Was it?
Beth stopped walking.
She pressed the tissue to her nose, breathing it in, and examined its peacock swirls. She hesitated, twisted it and threw it towards the canal. It seemed to float in the air, suspended by the mist before it fell, spreading as the rusty water bled into it, then folded in on itself and sank.
She walked on. She was on her own. Only herself.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Many thanks to Lucy Ash, Smita Bhide, Luigi Bonomi, Maxine Mei–Fung Chung, Philippa Cotton, Eleanor Crow, Shpresa Dogani, all at Faber Academy, SarahJane Forder, Melanie Garrett, Peter Grimsdale, Helen Healy, Alison Hennessy, Caroline Kelly, Allegra Le Fanu, Teresa Lobo, Charlotte Mendelson, Clemmie Mendelson, Theodore Mendelson, Jeremy P Morgan, Tamara Pollock, Selim Raka, Kate Saunders, Louisa Saunders, Helen Simpson, Richard Skinner, Gillian Stern, Becky Swift, Sandra Turnbull, Anya Whitmarsh, Sacha Whitmarsh, and Lauren Whybrow. Most of all, thank you to Alexandra Pringle, Jonny Geller, and all at Bloomsbury and Curtis Brown.
A NOTE ON THE AUTHOR
Joanna Briscoe is the author of five previous novels, including the bestselling Sleep With Me, which was adapted for ITV by Andrew Davies. She has been a columnist for the Independent and the Guardian, is a literary critic for the Guardian, and broadcasts regularly on Radio 4. Joanna lives in London.
joannabriscoe.com
@JoannaBriscoe
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First published in Great Britain 2020
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Copyright © Joanna Briscoe, 2020
Joanna Briscoe has asserted her right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Author of this work
This book is a work of fiction. References to real people, events, establishments, organisations or locales are intended only to provide a sense of authenticity, and are used fictitiously. All other characters, and all incidents and dialogue, are drawn from the author’s imagination and are not to be construed as real
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ISBN: HB: 978-1-4088-7349-6
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