by Jane Healey
In the kitchen, she quickly decants the Greek salad into a container, biting into a cherry tomato as Stuart heads back outside. She watches him through the low kitchen window as he bends over the table to reach something. She likes his belt, the way the brown stands out against the pale denim of his jeans and matches his worn suede shoes.
She rinses a cloth and carries it back out, the water cold on her fingers, drips darkening the patio slate before her. Stuart passes with an armful of plates, glasses, spoons. On the table there are two glasses left and a stack of placemats. She sweeps the surface with the cloth, feeling the hem of her skirt press against her thighs.
Stuart wanders out, unhurried, sipping at a fresh glass of water. She sees him glance at the port scar above the neckline of her top, and then he takes a seat on one of the loungers with murky green-yellow cushions at the edge of the patio. When she has finished wiping the table and stacking the two glasses on top of the placemats, she takes the lounger next to him, perches on the seat as if only pausing for a brief moment, as if she is so tired from wiping the table that it’s only natural to sit down there.
The sun is setting, the colours in the sky like a painting. ‘It’s beautiful,’ she remarks.
He nods, twirls his lighter in his hand, and then leans his head back against the seat. ‘I heard about you being ill. Well, more than ill,’ he corrects himself, looking pained as his eyes flicker to her scar again. ‘It must be difficult now, to get over something like that.’
Her body softens in the seat. ‘Yeah,’ she says, and folds her top lip over her bottom. ‘I stopped breathing once,’ she confesses quickly, ‘they had to revive me.’
He blows out a breath, raises his eyebrows. ‘Shit.’
‘Yeah,’ she says again. Her knee is shaking, there’s so much she wants to say. Her parents blanch when she tries to bring it up; her father has used the words dwell and unhealthy. It hurts them as parents to remember, she knows that, she’s not that selfish. It’s just that it hurts her too, all the time.
‘That’s heavy. Well, I’m glad you survived.’ His smile is a little sad. She’s pleased he doesn’t say something like her father did, about death making you all the more glad to be alive. ‘It must be hard,’ he repeats, rubbing the side of his thumb against his bottom lip.
‘It is.’ She holds his gaze, soaks in his concern.
He rubs his dry palms together. ‘I better get an early night, I’ve got a long drive tomorrow.’
She’s up and reaching for the stack on the table when he says, ‘Wait, I have something for you. Wait here and I’ll get it from the annexe.’
‘OK,’ she says, and watches him lope across the back garden towards the gate that will lead him to the courtyard and then the old dairy, the annexe. It’s a studio technically, a long one-storey building with whitewashed walls and a jumble of odd furniture rejected from the main house. When they moved here her father joked, in the way she knew wasn’t a joke, about it being a hangout for her, that she could have friends to stay there, get up to all the teenage shenanigans she had missed being ill. She imagines herself inside the annexe, lolling on the worn corduroy sofa, holding a vodka bottle in her fist, a tinny house music beat working its quick way through her.
Maeve lingers on the patio. The light in the garden is now a purpling blue, the birds chittering in the trees, the breeze making her skin prickle. But she’s worried she’ll be found there, waiting, and will have to say why, so she starts making her way across the lawn. After last week’s rain the grass is soft under her feet, the perfume of the flowers musty.
The gate creaks as he opens it. He doesn’t seem surprised to find her in the middle of the garden, hidden from the house by the rosebushes. He has a lit cigarette in his mouth now, which he takes out to speak. ‘Here,’ he says, blowing smoke at an angle away from her, a small motion of consideration that feels achingly chivalrous. ‘For your wall,’ he says, as he gives her two postcards a little worn at the edges, like they’ve been jostled in a bag, or held in a hot hand for too long.
‘Your dad was giving me the tour of the house,’ he explains, answering a question she didn’t ask, ‘and I saw your wall from the door. Do you have them already?’
‘No.’
‘This is the Millais, of course.’ He comes closer so that the sleeve of his t-shirt touches her arm, so that she can feel the heat his body gives out. ‘And this is Waterhouse, the one from 1889. He painted three Ophelias, slightly differently each time.’ The light has dropped now and she can’t make out the details of the background of the images, just pale faces and the white of Waterhouse’s swooning heroine.
‘I’ve seen this one in the Tate,’ she says, and looks up from the postcard to see him smile.
‘I’m glad. The Waterhouse is in a private collection,’ he adds, tapping the corner that sticks out, his finger brushing over her finger, making her knees twitch. ‘Lucky fucker to get to gaze at that over breakfast every day. Although knowing the rich, he’s probably got it in storage somewhere – it’s criminal.’
The light of his cigarette is like a firefly in the air.
‘Anyway, I thought you would like them.’
‘I do, thank you,’ she says, trying to imbue that phrase with a deeper gratitude.
‘Goodnight then,’ he says, with a brush of his hand on her shoulder.
‘Night,’ she murmurs, as the gate swings open and closed behind him.
Back in the house, she stands shivering in the middle of the dark kitchen before reaching for her father’s fleece and pulling it around her, wrapping her arms around herself too. The postcards are in one hand, the surface cool against her palm, and when she hears a sound in the hall, she hides them behind her.
‘What are you doing in the dark, darling,’ her mother says in a teasing tone. ‘Where is everyone?’ she adds, as she turns on the tap and the pipes groan.
‘Gone to bed,’ Maeve says.
‘Who was that on the phone?’ she asks Alex as he joins them.
‘Someone from work, some fuss in the Madrid office. That colour looks good on you, Maeve,’ he says of his navy fleece. ‘Are our two troublemakers asleep?’ he asks Ruth, as he kisses her on the cheek and opens the fridge.
‘Finally.’
‘It’s lucky you were such an easy child, Maeve, or we might not have had any more.’
‘Lucky that you had them before I got ill, you mean,’ she says, taking off the fleece.
‘Hey, don’t say that.’ Her father frowns.
‘I’m tired,’ she says and leaves the room, climbs the stairs, pausing on the top of the landing, the place where you can hear almost everything in the house.
‘Sometimes I feel like she blames us,’ she hears her father say.
‘Well, aren’t we to blame?’
‘I’m not going to dignify that with an answer. Are you sure you don’t want to talk to someone?’
‘About what?’
‘About everything. Your dad—’
‘I’m fine.’
‘Fine.’
In bed, with the new postcards carefully pinned to her wall, Maeve thinks of the walled garden. She thinks of the rosebushes, of the sliver of moon, the way the air on a hot summer evening feels thick with possibility. There used to be a pond near the back of the garden. She remembers crouching beside it as a child on one of her few visits to see her grandfather, staring at a pond skater and an autumn leaf twirling in its wake; she remembers the pain in her elbow when her mother snatched her back away from the edge. It was filled in with earth and flowers the next time she visited. But she imagines it wasn’t. Pictures herself there tonight, waiting among the lilies and dragonflies, her skirt heavy with water, the tremble of her breath rippling concentric rings in its surface.
Chapter Four
We are in the upstairs room that my father used to store junk, the air hazy with warm summer light and the dust our movements have kicked up. Michael, Iza, me, and the window man Alex had invited round to give a quote
without telling me, so that earlier I had left the downstairs loo while still zipping up my shorts to see a strange man in the dark of the hallway beyond the open front door.
He taps a pane with one finger. ‘This window frame is rotten.’
‘Is it?’ I reply briskly. All of the windows are rotten and leaking, the paint of the frames peeling in extravagant ribbons and shards that make me glad the twins are not young enough to put things like that in their mouths. As we tour the rooms, so many of them a jumble of boxes old and new, the man’s declarations of the windows’ poor state, the suck of his teeth, the scratch of his head, have taken on a satisfied tone, as if he had judged this house falling apart from the outside and is pleased to be proven right.
‘Have you tried opening this?’
‘That one, no.’
‘Mm, I wouldn’t. When they’re in a bad state, you can knock the whole thing out if you open it.’
‘I’ll keep that in mind.’
Iza is balancing on an old wooden chair, and I tug her back by her waistband as it wobbles when she reaches for a battered hat on top of the wardrobe. The twins haven’t been allowed in here before and ignored my polite request that they go and play downstairs, or join Maeve who is wisely slumped in front of the TV.
Michael is jimmying open a drawer of the filing cabinet with loud screeches, and the window man looks over at him and then at me. Something on top of the filing cabinet falls with a thump and rolls towards the man, who coughs pointedly.
I’m not interested in my parenting being judged along with the rotten windows and the state of the house, and by someone I never actually invited around. ‘Are you finished with your survey?’ I ask.
‘Well, almost—’
‘I’ve looked at the windows myself,’ I say, picking up the offending missile, a dusty cricket ball. ‘They’re all in a bad state, so just extrapolate, and call my husband when you have a quote.’
When I’ve led him to his car, I turn back to the house, ball still in hand. My thumb runs over the rough string, slides across the apple-red leather.
My father loved cricket. Sometimes he would bowl to me on the front lawn, calling out which ball he was throwing as I heaved his giant cricket bat towards it. I used to sit on the floor of his office on a rare Sunday when he was at home, listening to crackling test matches over the radio with the tang of pipe smoke and sherry in the air, hanging on his every wry comment. But he stopped playing cricket with me when I was nine or ten and stopped leaving the door to his office open, would switch off the radio when I knocked and entered, saying, Yes? Did you need something, Ruth?
I was too old to be a tomboy, to be treated as such by him, but he didn’t seem to know what to do with me as a girl either. It was as though he assumed that the next part should be up to my mother, only she wasn’t here. Most of my parenting had been done by the housekeeper and my teachers at school because he worked long days in London and went to events afterwards, sat on local boards, and disappeared on Saturdays for golf and lunches and more trips to the city; but that precious extra time with him faded away as I got older. He grew colder with me too, as if I was disappointing him, but left it up to me to work out why.
Stuart was welcome in his office though, in the last two summers before he went to university, and I had been jealous of him, though not as jealous as I would have been if he was being bowled to, perhaps, because I found everything about my father’s job in business law boring. Stuart wanted to work in law too – though not in business or family law but to fight against corporations and governments, to take the people’s side – and my father let him sit in on calls and discuss cases with him, quiz him on the knowledge inside the weighty tomes that looked desperately dull to my eyes.
Now, as I pass through the hall, I remember one summer afternoon when I had loitered there in the dark listening to the muffled voices in his office – my father’s crisp consonants and then the silences where Stuart’s softer voice fell. I remember that the empty house behind me had felt lonely, but that I couldn’t muster the energy to leave it for the bright outdoors either. My feet had been cold on the tile floor, my hair gnarled at the nape of my neck after waking from another airless night.
I heard a creak but couldn’t move fast enough as the door opened.
‘I look forward to hearing your thoughts,’ my father was saying, and I was close enough to see the warmth on his face as he looked at Stuart and then the twist in his mouth when he saw me.
I flushed.
‘Hello, Ruth,’ Stuart said with boyish delight.
At least someone was pleased to see me.
‘Did you want . . .?’ He held the office door open for me.
My father was looking down at his desk now, scribbling notes in the illegible handwriting that made me feel bad for his secretaries.
‘No, I was just passing by.’
Stuart closed the door and the hall was dark again. ‘I don’t know what you’re doing inside on such a lovely day,’ he teased, and I followed him out towards the front door. He paused on the threshold, squinting at the sun.
I had met Stuart for the first time about six years before, when I was walking along the lane of the hamlet and found a boy with dark curls and a sideways smile sitting in a tree. His father had just moved into the groundskeeper cottage, and Stuart was to spend his summers with him and away from his mother in London. They’re going to get divorced, he told me confidently that first day, as we shared sudden intimacies in the way children sometimes do, placing story upon story on imaginary scales to see if we might measure up. I didn’t see him between summers, or even think of him much, busy with my girlfriends from school, but whenever we met again we would slip back into a welcome closeness. Boys could be funny about being friends with girls, I had learned, but it seemed natural to Stuart.
‘Are you coming to the field later?’ I asked that summer day, as he pushed a curl behind his ear. There were three other teenagers staying with families in the holiday cottages, and we liked to hang out in the field near my house with the record player.
Stuart shook his head. His father made him work for him – mowing the lawns, shimmying up tree trunks, carrying garden waste to the compost or the bonfire, cleaning his tools. It’s not a holiday, boy, Stuart would recite with a guttural voice and a hint of a sneer, when he did an impression of him. The rare times I saw them standing near one another, I was endlessly surprised that they were even related: father red-cheeked and large-bellied – mean – son sallow, slim, always smiling.
‘How’s the law going?’
‘I’m learning a lot, being pushed. He knows so much.’ His voice dipped as he looked back at the house wistfully.
‘He’s my father, you know, you can’t have him,’ I said, trying to make a petulant joke.
‘I don’t want him. Don’t worry, I like you best,’ he said, putting an arm around my shoulder and squeezing it.
I shook him off and stuck out my tongue, ran across the lawn knowing that he would follow me. He caught me halfway with a laughing tug on my arm. I bent over to catch my breath, and to hide my pleased smile.
‘You don’t mind him tutoring me, do you?’ he checked.
‘It’s fine.’
‘Not all of us were born with a silver spoon, you know, Ruth, I need every bit of help I can get.’
‘Oh, yeah, we’re rolling in money,’ I said.
I remember that now, the solipsism of my youth, how I thought that because we didn’t have nice cars and fancy holidays and fistfuls of cash, my father and I weren’t comfortable, well off, compared to others, to Stuart. I think of it now that I know how expensive it is to keep a house like this one going, as my eyes skim across the patch of damp by the base of the stairs and the bulge of the flaky window pane at the top, before returning to the junk room.
The piles of boxes, the sheer weight of my father’s belongings crowding out the room, makes me angry. Why should I be the one to have to clear it out, why couldn’t he have done it? I hadn
’t expected to be left the house and its responsibilities – we were estranged after all – but when I told Alex this, he only said quizzically, Well, who else would he have left it to?
Alex is a fan of logic, of things that make sense, and estrangement doesn’t make sense. He doesn’t like to have the neat rules of his world upset. When Maeve had first been diagnosed, he had sat there frowning at the doctor as if she were a schoolchild who had made a mistake with her algebra.
I’m in the garden when Alex gets home, drinking a gin and tonic with gin pilfered from my father’s healthy stash of dusty bottles in the cellar, and an old tonic from the fridge gone almost flat.
‘I saw Paige at the station,’ Alex says, as he walks up to where I’ve dragged a chair, facing the rosebushes.
‘Who’s Paige?’
‘The market stall. The woman who sells honey from her bees?’
‘Oh, yes.’ Alex has discovered the Saturday market in the village and comes back from his trips laden with farm goods of varying quality, gossip, and a wholesome glow. The things he buys are extras; he doesn’t have to do the twice-weekly shop or drive in and out to the village, to the pharmacy and the doctor’s and the library, with the twins arguing in the back. He still has to drive to and from the station in the other direction though, so perhaps I’m being unfair.
‘Have a good day?’
‘You didn’t tell me the window man was coming.’
‘Did I not?’
I stand up and shield my eyes from the sun. ‘I’m not a housekeeper, Alex.’
‘Hey, where’s this coming from?’ He puts a hand on my arm. ‘You know they needed doing. I’m sorry if I forgot to tell you. If you let me know your schedule—’
‘We don’t always have one. You can’t expect that I’ll be waiting around here.’
‘That’s not fair—’
‘We can’t even afford the windows done.’
‘I wanted to check, to be thorough.’
Stuart has arrived home now and is walking towards us. ‘I brought some rosé, do you two want some now?’
